Nick Ainger: I totally agree with the hon. Lady. It is important that we take forward the CAP reform agenda, and Britain is now acknowledged as leading in Europe in on CAP reform. I can assure her that, although we want to introduce such reforms, the intention is not to penalise our own agricultural industry in doing so. It is clear that the reforms already in place have not penalised our farmers, and we want to continue in that vein.

Elfyn Llwyd: I agree with what the Minister has just said, but may I draw his attention to another important, current subject: the failure of the fallen stock scheme? This Government would not allow Wales, and north Wales in particular, to be exempted from the scheme, which, for obvious reasons that we warned about at the time, proved impractical. We now have rotting carcasses throughout farms in north and mid-Wales, which is bad for biosecurity and human health and, I am afraid, the economy. Will the Minister please speak to his bungling colleagues in the National Assembly?

Cheryl Gillan: Borders mean nothing to animal disease, so dealing with tuberculosis in cattle and cattle movements between England and Wales requiresclose co-operation between the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Assembly Government and the British Cattle Movement Service, as the Minister will doubtless acknowledge. What checks has he made on the co-ordination of data relating to pre-movement TB tests, and what percentage and number of TB reactors have so far been picked up in pre-movement testing in Wales?

Roger Williams: We support the Government in dealing with asbestos-related illnesses, but will the Minister also consider dealing with the miners who have dust-related injuries and have not yet received their compensation? Irefer to one of my constituents, Donald Watkins of Pontneathvaughn, who has been waiting six and a half years. These miners are becoming older and iller by the day and the same sometimes applies to their widows. Will the Minister cut through the crap and ensure that they get the compensation that they deserve?

Michael Fabricant: If I were to take you,Mr. Speaker, to Dolffanog Fach, or perhaps the Old Rectory overlooking the Tal-y-llyn lake not far from Abergynolwyn in mid-Wales, you would have the opportunity to eat the finest Welsh beef made from Welsh black cattle. We heard about that earlier, but I should not have to take you that far, Mr. Speaker. I could take you to the White Hart in London, but other places do not serve Welsh black cattle beef. What can the Minister do to ensure that England and Scotland enjoy the benefits of the finest British beef—Welsh black cattle?

David Jones: Does the Minister agree that fundamental to the promotion of Welsh produce in England is the ability to transport that produce to England in the first place? Does he therefore share my concern at the continuing closure of the A5 trunk road between Maerdy and Dinmael, which was closed with little warning on 26 May and remains closed with no indication of when it willbe reopened? Does he share my despair at the incompetence of the Assembly in dealing with the issue?

Nick Ainger: I accept the importance of reopening the A5 as quickly as possible. As the hon. Gentleman will know, the closure was because of a serious risk of injury from an unstable cliff face. He will also be aware that while most landowners on the old A5, which could provide an alternative route, are co-operating with the Welsh Assembly Government, one has unfortunately decided not to do so at this stage. The matter needs to be addressed quickly and I understand that Andrew Davies, the Minister with responsibility for transport in Wales, is dealing with it as a priority. Its importance is recognised, but if the hon. Gentleman wants to make his views known I will pass them on to Andrew Davies. Perhaps he should also make a direct approach.

Peter Hain: We are looking closely at the matter, but I remind the hon. Gentleman that we are providing£150 million a year to support rural post offices, as part of a £2 billion investment in the post office network since 1999. None of that would have been made if his party's policy of privatising the Post Office had been implemented.

Adam Price: Banks have closed branches in rural and valley communities, and one adult in seven in Wales does not have a bank account. Does not the Secretary of State see that the Post Office card account, which is usedby 360,000 people, is vital to combating financial exclusion in disadvantaged communities?

Nhs

David Cameron: But all our surgeries are fullof the victims of incompetence— [Interruption.] Yes, his incompetence—the Chancellor designed and administered the tax credit system, yet he has not made a single statement, or answered a single oral question in the House of Commons, on tax credits in the past year. Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that Ministers should not just blame officials when things go wrong. I agree with that. But is not the Chancellor's behaviour typical of this Government? Ministers create a massive bureaucracy that becomes a painful paper chase for hard-working families, so why do they refuse to take responsibility when it all goes wrong?

Dari Taylor: My right hon. Friend knows the joys of family life. He knows, too, that this Saturday is national infertility day. Thousands of couples remain childless, and they desperately hope to access the medical intervention of in vitro fertilisation in the hope that it will give them the precious gift of a child. Will he restate the commitment that he gave in February 2004 that every infertile couple should be given one NHS IVF treatment, and will he join me in condemning the25 per cent. of primary care trusts that deny people access to IVF and other PCTs that claim that it is only available to couples over 30, when the intervention process is seriously dysfunctional?

Tony Blair: We are working with the leading organisation for patients requiring fertility treatment—the Infertility Network UK—to help them in their relationships with the primary care trusts to make sure that their voice is heard. Ultimately, those are decisions are for primary care trusts, but it is important that the cycle of treatment is available to people. Obviously, it is agonising for the families involved, which is one reason why we asked the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence to produce a report, which was published last December. We will do all that we can to take it forward.

Andy Reed: As you are aware, because of your generous support,Mr. Speaker, 100 Members from all parts of the House will be taking part in the Westminster mile for Sport Relief in the next hour or so, to be started by Roger Bannister. Will my right hon. Friend pass on his congratulations to Sport Relief on its work and the projects that it runs? Will he commit himself to taking part, as he did in 2004? Most importantly, will he put at the heart of the Government's approach tackling poverty both at home and abroad, to make sure that in the future projects like Sport Relief are not needed, because we have the means and the technology—now we just need the political will—to tackle the worst causes of poverty across the globe?

Jeff Ennis: Will my right hon. Friend accept my personal gratitude for his swift response to a recent meeting that I had in his office, along with the hon. Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink) and representatives from the Association of Children's Hospices, in granting an additional£27 million over the next three years to children's hospices? That is fantastic news, but will my right hon. Friend give me his reassurance that the Government will continue to have discussions and engage with the association, not just in the short term but in the medium and long term, on children's palliative care?

NHS PERFORMANCE

Patricia Hewitt: With permission, Mr. Speaker, I wish to make a statement about the NHS chief executive's report and NHS finances for 2005-06.
	Sir Ian Carruthers, acting chief executive of the NHS, today publishes his first report on the performance of the NHS, including the provisional financial out-turn for the last financial year. A copy has been placed in the Library, together with a more detailed report on the finances from the Department's director of finance, Richard Douglas. This information also forms part of the Government's evidence to the Select Committee on Health, which is conducting an inquiry into these matters.
	I should like to begin by reminding the House of the context. Following decades of growth averaging around 3.1 per cent. a year, since 1997 the NHS has received annual average growth in funding of 6.4 per cent. The NHS budget, which has already doubled compared with 1997, will have trebled by 2008. That unprecedented investment has enabled the NHS to employ an additional 307,000 staff, including 85,000 more nurses. I am sure the whole House will want to express our thanks to all NHS staff for their outstanding dedication and hard work. With that investment has come reform, giving patients more choice for elective operations, using the independent sector to add to the capacity and innovation of the NHS, and establishing NHS foundation trusts with more freedom to respond to local people's needs.
	Sir Ian's report shows that NHS staff are continuing to improve patient care. Waiting times are continuing to fall. Virtually no-one now waits more than six months for an operation, compared with 270,000 patients who were waiting more than six months for an operation in 2000. The majority are treated much more quickly—the average wait for an operation is around just seven and a half weeks. There is now a maximum 13-week wait for an out-patient appointment. Again, the average wait is much shorter, with four out of five people getting their first out-patient appointment within eight weeks.
	Nearly 99 per cent. of people with cancer are treated within a maximum of 31 days of diagnosis, and more than 91 per cent. are treated within 62 days of an urgent referral from their GP, compared with only75 per cent. one year ago. Early deaths from coronary heart disease, cancer and suicide continue to fall.
	Patient care is improving everywhere but some parts of the country face significant financial problems.
	The provisional unaudited figures for 2005-06 show a net overspend across the NHS, excluding foundation trusts, of £512 million. That is made up of a gross deficit of £1.27 billion, offset by surpluses of £765 million. Although we clearly cannot allow that position to continue, we also need to put it into perspective. The net deficit in the NHS is less than 1 per cent. of the NHS revenue budget and is concentrated in a minority of organisations.
	Seven out of 10 hospitals and other NHS organisations are not only improving patient care, employing more staff and paying them better than ever, but doing so within their budget. Two out of 10 have relatively small levels of overspending and only one in 10 NHS hospitals and other organisations account for more than two thirds of the overspending.
	My decision to publish those unaudited financial figures, together with the director of finance's report to me, reflects our commitment to greater transparency in the NHS. In future, we will publish quarterly reports on NHS finances.
	In the past, because the focus was largely on the overall financial position of the NHS, overspending organisations had little incentive to improve their performance but relied on other parts of the service to bail them out. The system was unfair because most of the overspending occurred in better-off areas with a generally healthier population and most of the underspending was in places with far greater health needs and health inequalities. We are not prepared to allow that unfairness to continue.
	By the end of the financial year, we will return the NHS as a whole to financial balance. The turnaround teams that I announced to the House in January are helping organisations with the biggest financial problems to implement recovery plans that will allow them to maintain and improve patient care within their budgets. As most of the NHS demonstrates, and Sir Ian confirms in his report, there should be no trade-off between improving patient care and sound financial management. They go together.
	We are aiming for all organisations with deficits to reach monthly balance of income and expenditure by the beginning of April next year. However, there will be some exceptional cases when an organisation needs longer to make the necessary changes while maintaining patient care. However, because overspending in one organisation has to be balanced by underspending elsewhere, we will continue to challenge and expect that minority of organisations to return to monthly balance as quickly as possible.
	We have also asked the new strategic health authorities to establish a regional reserve that will support organisations while they return to balance. That means asking primary care trusts that have stayed within their budget or delivered a surplus to contribute some of their growth money, which averages 9.2 per cent., in the current year and to postpone some of the improvements that they were planning to make for their patients. However, that money will not be lost to those communities. It will be repaid, normally in the three-year allocations period. I have stressed to the health authorities that the areas with the greatest health needs should be repaid first.
	There will be difficult decisions to make, especially in the minority of trusts with substantial deficits. In some cases, that will mean work force reductions and we all understand the anxiety and uncertainty that that causes for staff who have dedicated their lives to the NHS.
	However, there will not be the wholesale redundancies across the NHS that some commentators have forecast. In most cases, as Sir Ian stresses, work force reductions will be achieved by natural turnover, reduced spending on expensive agency staff, redeploying staff and freezing some posts. Compulsory redundancies will be kept to an absolute minimum and those affected will, of course, be given as much support as possible to find a new post.
	The NHS is treating more patients and saving more people's lives than ever before. Of course there is still more to do to meet the public's rising expectations, as people are living longer and a revolution is taking place in medical care and scientific knowledge. But Sir lan's report today shows that the NHS is on the right track, and I commend it to the House.

Andrew Lansley: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving me the opportunity to see her statement and the financial performance report 40 minutes ago. After her excursion into a parallel universe, it is about time we came back down to earth. She has come to the House today to admit that, for the fourth year in a row under this Government, the financial situation in the national health service is deteriorating, and that the deficit is a great deal larger than in the previous year. She says that there was a net deficit of £512 million in the last financial year. On a like-for-like basis, it was £216 million in the previous financial year, so it is now more than two and a half times greater.
	The Secretary of State's policy has failed, but of course it is the civil servants and the managers in the NHS who will get the blame. Trusts will be singled out and told that they are responsible for the deficit. Sir Nigel Crisp resigned in March. If everything was going so well in March, I wonder why the chief executive of the NHS had to leave in those circumstances. Since then, there has been an exodus from the Department of Health, with people either jumping or being ejected from the sinking ship. Many of them have rightly said that the NHS is suffering from the void of leadership in the rudderless Department of Health. The growing gap between the hard-working staff in the NHS and the leadership that ought to be coming from the Department of Health is causing a crisis of confidence.
	The Secretary of State's statement purported to give us financial information about the past year. Shegave us the unaudited figures, and mentioned a sum of £512 million. Did she go on to tell us that the unaudited figures last year were out by 80 per cent. compared with the audited figures? The audited figures were £112 million higher than the unaudited figures. We do not yet know what this year's audited figures are going to be.
	The Secretary of State told us that the gross deficit was £1.27 billion. That is about 1.5 per cent. of the total NHS allocations. She then said that that was being offset by surpluses. Well, yes indeed—there are £760 million of surpluses. But she did not tell the House that more than £500 million of those surpluses have been generated by the strategic health authorities. That means that they have cut their budgets, and they are planning to do so again this year. Most of those cuts will involve training budgets, which will mean fewer posts for doctors and nurses coming into the profession seeking to pursue their vocation. If there is a 10 per cent. cut in training budgets this year—as postgraduate deans across the country expect—that will affect 4,000 training posts for doctors. In Stoke yesterday, a lecturer in nursing at Keele university told me that— [ Interruption.]

Steve Webb: I thank the Secretary of State for her statement. Will she confirm that she just told the House that the NHS deficit has doubled in the past year? Will she confirm that one in three trusts are in deficit and that one in 10 are in serious deficit, which is more than last year? Will she confirm thatthe scale of the deficits is so much that the deficit trusts between them have run up a deficit in excess of£1 billion, which they will have to sort out, including paying back any assistance that they get from other trusts? The Secretary of State gave figures excluding foundation trusts. What are the figures including foundation trusts?
	Who is responsible for the financial crisis? If the Government set the pay rate for GPs, doctors and consultants, set "Agenda for Change" and NHS staff rates, set the tariff for how much trusts get and set all the targets, is it someone else's fault or is it the Government's fault if the sums do not add up? Will the Secretary of State take responsibility for the deficit in the NHS? How much of it is due to Department of Health mistakes, creating bodies that get abolished a few years later and negotiating contracts that result in overspending—the GP contract and the consultant contract? Is that her fault or someone else's fault? Can we believe her when she says that the NHS will be in balance at the end of the year when Sir Nigel Crisp said in December that the deficit this year would only be £200 million and then, just a few months later, she told us that it would be two and a half times as big? Why should we believe her when she says that she will get the deficit under control this time around?
	The surpluses in the NHS are in different places to the deficits, so the gross deficit of £1.2 billion is huge. Is not it the case that it takes incredible mismanagement to spend record sums of money on the NHS and to come to the House admitting the worst deficits in years? How has the Secretary of State achieved that? How did she manage to do that?
	Is not it the case that what is going on is breakneck NHS reform, because the Prime Minister said that he will not go until the NHS is sorted out? How quickly will it be sorted out? Is not it the case that what we are getting is not measured organisational change, with long-term planning and rational reorganisation, but emergency cuts packages to deal with a short-term financial crisis? Does the Secretary of State accept that that is no way to run the NHS?

Patricia Hewitt: I am sure that the hon. Lady and her constituents will warmly welcome the new hospital and the far better facilities that it will offer patients. I have no doubt that the point that she makes is also being made by many hospitals that have been overspending. The chief executive and chair of her local hospital will of course be discussing this matter with the London strategic authority, which has a reserve power; ithas the discretion—but only in exceptional circumstances—to allow longer for that recovery to take place.

Edward Leigh: At12.30 pm today, the National Audit Office published the summarised accounts for 2004-05. The Secretary of State has announced today an unaudited deficit for 2005-06 of £512 million. For foundation hospitals, that will rise to £536 million. However, if we look at the audited accounts for 2004-05, we see that the audited account deficit was almost twice as much as the unaudited deficit. In light of what has happened in the last year, what credence can we give to these figures, which are unaudited, and how much trust can we have in financial management in some parts of the NHS?

Patricia Hewitt: As I said earlier, I am proud of the fact that we are paying our staff more. "Agenda for Change", in particular, has been a huge step forward, ensuring that we can guarantee our staff equal pay for work of equal value and reward them for taking on greater responsibilities. We have put more than£1 billion additional funding into the NHS simply to fund "Agenda for Change". The great majority of NHS organisations are meeting those obligations, paying staff more and employing more staff, but doing so within their budgets, which we expect the rest of the NHS to do.

Charles Walker: Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I wrote a letter six weeks ago to the Minister of State, Department of Health, the hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint), asking for a meeting to bring local mental health charities to visit her to discuss cuts in my local mental health service. What can I do to secure a positive response and advance that meeting?

FIRE SAFETY (REDUCED IGNITION PROPENSITY IN CIGARETTES)

David Taylor: I beg to move,
	That leave be given to bring in a Bill to align cigarette manufacturing standards with international best practice so as to reduce the number of fires and fatalities in the home caused by cigarettes.
	This Bill would require that tobacco firms modify their cigarettes so that they have a reduced ignition propensity. Essentially, that means that such cigarettes go out if left without being drawn on for more than a few seconds. The House is of course well aware of the toll of premature death and disease caused by smoking. As a result of recent debates, if nothing else, we are also now well informed about the damage that breathing in other people's smoke can do to one's health. However, there is a third element of the misery caused by smoking that is perhaps less well understood, and that is the number of deaths and injuries from fires started by cigarettes. I commend the Fire Brigades Union and Action on Smoking and Health for the work they have done to highlight the continuing risks associated with smouldering cigarettes.
	Despite some success with "stub it out" campaigns, the number of tragic and avoidable deaths in such domestic fires has proved hard to drive down. The Government report "Fire Statistics for the United Kingdom" shows that in 2004, 3,500 fires in dwellings were caused by smoking materials, not including cigarette lighters and matches, and a further 1,600 in other buildings. Over the previous 10 years, the number of such fires totalled more than 60,000. Fires in dwellings caused in that way resulted in 114 deaths in 2004 and 1,260 non-fatal casualties. Smokers' materials are the most frequent source of ignition causing accidental dwelling fire deaths, accounting for around a third of such deaths every year. The vast majority of those fires were caused by manufactured cigarettes.
	The victims of those fires are more likely to be from low-income households and of course they include non-smokers as well as smokers, children as well as adults, and firefighters as well as members of the public, so this is no trivial matter. If the dry statistics are not enough, the human stories behind them are all too evident. For example, the  Edinburgh Evening News of 16 May this year reported on a fire that left a child aged less than 18 months with burns over almost half his body, requiring the amputation of two of his toes. It also left his family without a home. By great good fortune, and thanks to the presence of a smoke alarm, no lives were lost. Investigators believe that that fire, like so many others, was most likely to have been caused by smokers' materials.
	Tobacco manufacturers have long dismissed the link between cigarettes and fire deaths as "merely a public perception", but for more than 20 years, as internal industry documents clearly show, the tobacco industry has known full well that many of those fires could be easily prevented. It argues that the introduction of cigarettes with a reduced propensity to ignite would lead to more negligent behaviour, but that is not a valid argument as the changes needed to the cigarette are slight and unlikely to be noticed by smokers. There are also many examples of safety standards being imposed on consumer products to protect public health without triggering dangerous or irrational behaviour, such as seatbelts and airbags in cars. If that argument were accepted, nothing would be accomplished by any attempt by the authorities to impose safety standards on consumer products. To avoid misleading descriptions, I suggest the use of the term "reduced ignition propensity"—as used in Canada—rather than "fire safe" or "self-extinguishing".
	In January 2000, the tobacco firm Philip Morris introduced a reduced ignition propensity cigarette into the market, using small speed bands on special paper, which ensured that the cigarette rapidly went out if not actively smoked. In August 2000, New York state passed fire safety regulations requiring that all cigarettes sold there had to meet reduced ignition standards by June 2003. Early figures suggest that that may have reduced the number of fire deaths from smoking materials across the state by at least a third. Similar standards now apply in Canada, and the regulatory impact assessment there forecasts a reduction in the number of fires caused by manufactured cigarettes of up to two thirds. In the US, Illinois and Vermont have already followed the example of New York.
	In this country, a fire research report done for the former Office of the Deputy Prime Minister estimated that, had cigarettes in the UK conformed to the highest standards in New York, the number of fires caused by cigarettes would have fallen by nearly two thirds. The ODPM figures suggest that that would have meant 78 fewer deaths in 2003 alone.
	Such standards could be introduced across the European Union, under the general product safety directive. Indeed, the European Commission is believed to favour such a move. Therefore, I hope very much that we can now discount early rumours that officials at the Department of Trade and Industry might not support further progress on this issue, when the relevant Committee meets in Brussels on 13 and14 June next week. I understand and accept that the DTI rightly seeks to protect business from unnecessary regulation, but I do not accept that the bulging bank accounts of the tobacco industry really need such diligent defence by Government officials. Surely the experience of that child in Edinburgh and the thousands of other victims of fires caused by cigarettes merit a little consideration.
	If DTI officials are really so worried, let me reassure them that reduced ignition standards could be introduced at minimal cost to business and without threatening sales. Many of us may say in relation to cigarettes that that is not something to be given undue priority in any event. I hope that, now this matter has been drawn to the attention of Ministers, they will instruct their officials to take a more constructive approach. However, this House does not need to wait for the cumbersome processes of the European Union and the internal workings of Whitehall Departments to bear fruit. My Bill would require this simple and overdue measure to be introduced in the United Kingdom.
	Smoking is a lawful activity in a free society, but it brings with it terrible problems and it is surely our job as legislators to ensure that they are minimised as far as possible. In this case, we could introduce reduced ignition standards without affecting anyone's freedom to any significant extent. The number of fires would be reduced. The number of deaths and serious injuries in fires would fall too, and insurance costs would fall with them. The Department of Health would be assisted in its hugely important aim of reducing health inequalities. The Department of Communities and Local Government would be helped to meet its equally crucial public service agreement target of cutting the number of deaths from fires in the home by a fifth by 2010. And fewer young children like the Edinburgh toddler would be exposed to horrific accidents and injuries.
	In my own county of Leicestershire, a 55-year-old Anstey man would still be alive today if this Bill had been on the statute book, as would a 70-year-old woman from Fleckney. Residents in Thringstone and Ravenstone, wards that I have represented at various stages in my local government career, would not have had some serious fires occur in their homes—so it is not surprising that the Bill is supported by firefighters who, all too often, have to risk their own safety to deal with fires caused by cigarettes. That is especially true for those in the Leicestershire fire service, whom I thank for their research into one element of the Bill.
	In short, everyone one would gain from my Bill—and even the tobacco industry would barely notice its effect. The recent historic votes in this House on the Health Bill show that there is overwhelming support for action to reduce the burden of death and disease caused by smoking. We must disregard the rather odd conclusion reached yesterday by the Economic Affairs Committee in the other place, which suggested that we should have legislated to prevent passive smoking in the home—how on earth would we do that?—instead of taking the historic step of eliminating it in workplaces and enclosed public spaces. I chair the all-party group on smoking and health, and I respectfully suggest that their Lordships are somewhat detached from reality on this issue.
	I recently tabled early-day motion 2290, which draws attention to the hundreds of lives being lost in fires caused by smoking-related materials. I am gratified at the extent of support already shown by parliamentary colleagues for that motion.
	Where we cannot persuade people to quit smoking altogether, we can—and must—act to reduce the harm caused by that habit and addiction. My Bill is a simple and overdue measure that is designed to achieve precisely that. I commend it to the House.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	Bill ordered to be brought in by David Taylor, Norman Baker, Mr. Kevin Barron, Mr. Peter Bone, Colin Burgon, Mr. David Drew, Dr. Ian Gibson, Mr. Lindsay Hoyle, Helen Jones, Mr. Gordon Prentice, John Robertson and Bob Russell.

OPPOSITION DAY

[The Sixth Report of the Treasury Committee, Session 2005-06, HC 811, on the Administration of Tax Credits, is relevant.]

George Osborne: I beg to move,
	That this House notes the overpayment, fraud and incompetence in the administration of the tax credit system; is concerned about the impact of this incompetence on the most vulnerable members of society; and calls upon the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the author of the tax credit policy, to explain to this House what measures are being undertaken to address these problems.
	The incompetent administration of tax credits touches the constituents of every Member of this House. This debate could not be more timely: last week, the Inland Revenue revealed that almost half of the 6 million people in receipt of tax credits were paid the wrong amount. That is a staggering level of error, and an increase on the previous year.
	I welcome to the debate the Chairman of the main Treasury Select Committee, and his counterpart on the Treasury Sub-Committee. The Treasury Committee,of course, is made up of. Members from all parties. Yesterday, it published a report identifying Government error as a key cause of the overpayments. In its briefing for this debate, the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux reminds us that, four years after the introduction of tax credits, it continues to see
	"thousands of families who face hardship and genuine confusion as they have been told that they have been overpaid but given no explanation and no warning before payments are suddenly cut".
	Yet the Chancellor of the Exchequer still lacks the courage to defend a policy that he designed and implemented. We are told that he is at ECOFIN—the first such meeting that he has attended since December. Two days ago, he was planning to send the Paymaster General. We know that because we have the list of the week's events produced by No. 10 Downing street. It clearly states:
	"EU ECOFIN Council meets in Luxembourg — Paymaster General Dawn Primarolo attends."
	Then this debate was called and, for some reason, the Chancellor of the Exchequer changed his mind. Is it not strange how the right hon. Gentleman is always around to take the credit if things go well, but always happy to let others take the blame when things go wrong? Not once in the past year has he made a statement, taken part in a debate or even answered a question on tax credits. It is the policy that dares not speak its name, from a Chancellor who dares not open his mouth. Prime Ministers need many qualities, but political cowardice is not one of them.
	In the Chancellor's absence, we have the poor new Chief Secretary to the Treasury. He, at least, must know something about the chaos in the tax credits system as he happens to represent the constituency with the largest number of people who are overpaid and the largest number who are underpaid in the entire country. Half of all the hon. Gentleman's constituents in East Ham who claim tax credits receive the wrong amount from the Department that he helps to run.
	The Chief Secretary will undoubtedly tell us that the amount being overpaid across the country has fallen a little, to a mere £1.7 billion. When he does so, perhaps he will confirm that the number of people being overpaid has risen, with almost 3 million people getting the wrong award. When he tells us that help is going to the poorest families, will he also confirm that more than 100,000 of the poorest families—those on incomes of less than £5,000—did not receive the level of support to which they were entitled? When he tells us about what he has called in the past couple of days the "improved performance" of the tax credits system, will he explain why the number of people in his constituency being overpaid has doubled in a year? Why did NACAB tell me yesterday that there was no sign of a reduction in the number of families contacting it?

George Osborne: As I understand it—there is an opportunity for the Chief Secretary to clarify this—the reduction of a third was if all the changes, both the reporting requirements and the increase in the disregard, were to take place. The increase in the earnings disregard simply reclassifies overpayments as disregarded income. That is one of the ways in which the Government are dealing with the problem.
	As I said, the Chief's Secretary's admission was extraordinary. As the Child Poverty Action Group reminded us last week:
	"behind these figures are thousands of families struggling to survive when the overpayments are clawed back".
	Not that we need reminding—we see that every weekin our constituency surgeries. A disabled young constituent of mine told me that she was
	"at the point of despair"
	because of the clawback of tax credits that were rightfully hers. The chairman of the Inland Revenue wrote to me about the case earlier this year. He said:
	"I am sorry to say that when we processed your constituent's claim we missed including her new income details".
	How can one possibly miss including the income details when one processes a tax credit claim? That reveals a deep flaw in the system.
	The new changes announced by the Government include new obligations on claimants to fill in more forms and to file them more quickly—any bureaucracy's answer to any problem. Why do not the changes also include new obligations on the Treasury? The parliamentary ombudsman recommended a year ago that the Government introduce a statutory test for the recovery of overpayments that gives people a right to appeal to an independent tribunal when they think that the Revenue has got things wrong. That is the same test that exists for other benefits. The parliamentary ombudsman said that the test would
	"strike the right balance between the obligations on the part of the administrators and those on the part of the recipients".
	NACAB says today that the test would
	"build confidence in...the decisions being made".
	Why have the Government refused to introduce that statutory test? Why are they instead imposing new obligations on the recipients that are not matched by new obligations on the administrators?

John Bercow: Surely the impenetrable complexity of the system is such that it is understood only by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, if at all. Is it not distinctly shameful for him to have devised a system that is even more complicated than the Schleswig-Holstein question? At least three people understood that—even if one of them went mad, the seconddied and the third forgot what the answer to the question was.

George Osborne: It is an extraordinary example—one of many. I suspect that every Member could produce similar examples of computer errors.
	The Government finally sacked EDS, the company that provided the computer, and announced triumphantly that the company would pay them compensation. However, as yesterday's Select Committee report shows, the deal done by Ministers means that—this is truly incredible—full compensation is paid only if EDS wins other Government contracts. In short, the company that Ministers believe is guilty of messing up the tax credit computer will pay full compensation to taxpayers only if it is given a chance to mess up another Government computer system. Only this Government could negotiate such an incompetent deal, and now they refuse to discuss the details of the deal on the ground of commercial confidentiality. The Select Committee is right—Ministers should be accountable for the mistakes that they make and subject to parliamentary scrutiny on the arrangements into which they enter on our behalf, instead of hiding behind commercial contracts.
	Of course, it is not only the computer that has cost the taxpayer millions of pounds, but fraud, which brings me to my third question—what is the true cost of tax credit fraud and what are the Government doing to tackle it? The Government refuse to tell us the true extent of tax credit fraud. According to the Paymaster General, there have been
	"persistent attempts by organised criminals to obtain tax credits by using stolen or fictitious identities".
	We know that the Government had to abandon their online application system six months ago after systematic abuse. We know, too, that although Ministers say that they are acting tough, there were just 211 prosecutions for tax credit fraud, with only two for organised tax credit fraud, out of 6.5 million applications. However, we do not know when Ministers knew for the first time that systematic fraud was taking place or how much money has been lost. Does the figure run into hundreds of millions of pounds, or even billions?
	Ministers were warned about the possibility of fraud before the tax credit system was introduced. Why did the Chancellor ignore the series of security checks that was proposed by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) when he was Minister for welfare reform? The right hon. Gentleman said earlier this year:
	"After I resigned ... the counter-fraud measures were not carried out and now it shows in the figures".
	Why were those counter-fraud measures not carried out?
	What about stopping fraud in the future? Surely the Select Committee is right when it warns that increasing the earnings disregard to £25,000 creates an incentive for further fraud as people deliberately fluctuate their incomes from year to year, but the Government have done nothing to prevent that from happening. Will the Chief Secretary address that problem today, too?
	The Paymaster General promised the House on13 December 2005 that the Treasury would provide
	"more comprehensive information on the level of claimant error and fraud ... in spring 2006."—[ Official Report, 10 January 2006; Vol. 441, c. 551W.]
	I know that winter has descended early on the Labour party and it is getting its seasons muddled up, but it is now June. Where is the information that we were promised for the spring?
	For the second year running, ministerial incompetence and computer chaos have caused hardship for hundreds of thousands of people and cost the taxpayer billions of pounds, so I ask my final question—is it not time that the Government looked at the design of the tax credit system? The Government say that money has got to the poorest, but after spending more than £15 billion a year, it would be extraordinary if it had not. However, that comes at a price. In the words of the right hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn), a great friend of the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, in the Budget debate in the House:
	"poverty has become more entrenched."
	The right hon. Gentleman said:
	"the number facing marginal tax rates of 60 per cent. or more has increased by nearly 1 million, largely as a consequence of the workings of the tax credit system."

Jim Devine: It is great to hear to hear the hon. Gentleman giving advice, but in his interview in last month's edition of  Magill, the well-respected Irish magazine, he said:
	"anyone who says that I haven't known adversity hasn't looked at my CV—I worked for John Major when we lost the 1997 election".
	He then said that he worked for the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) when the Conservatives lost in 2001. He went on to say:
	"That doesn't say much for the quality of my advice"—
	so why should we listen to him now?

Stephen Timms: Today's debate gives us the welcome opportunity to reflect immediately on yesterday's report from the Treasury Committee on the administration of tax credits. We will, of course, respond to the report in full in due course. In the mean time, I welcome it as a constructive contribution to the debate, and I hope that it offers the prospect of a new consensus throughout the House on the advantages of the tax credit system.
	The hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) said, in introducing the report, that tax credits are right in principle. I agree. The report rightly drew attention to the wide support among non-Government organisations, such as Citizens Advice, for the tax credit system. It underlined the importance of improving the quality of service provided to tax credit claimants. I agree about that as well.
	It is a shame that the speech of the hon. Member for Tatton did not reflect very much of the now broad agreement on the gains from the tax credit system. He told us that he agreed that tax credits are right in principle, but he did not tell us very much about his agreement. It seemed that he was much more anxious to voice his criticism of the system than to explain why he now supports it.
	I remind the House why there is broad agreement about the gains from the tax credit system. Let us consider the progress that we have made since 1997.

Stephen Timms: I shall set out the progress that we are making on that, because I think that it will be acknowledged that it has led to considerable improvements. Before I do so, I am grateful for acknowledgement of the benefits of the system, which I shall set out. First, tax credits have significantly improved incentives to work. In the past, far too many people found that they were better off on benefits than in a job. Tax credits have put that right. That is one of the reasons why so many more people are now in work and why the historic high rate of employment that we have achieved has been maintained for so long. Secondly, the tax credit system has reduced the tax burden on low to middle-income families. An OECD study, published in March, showed that, thanks to tax credits, net tax paid by a couple with one child living on the average manufacturing wage has fallen from more than 17 per cent. in 1997 to less than 10 per cent. now. That is a dramatic reduction in the tax burdenfor people who are benefiting greatly from the improvements that have been introduced.

Stephen Timms: If I understood him correctly, the shadow Chancellor wants a more flexible inflexible system. However, I look forward to the contributionof my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire (Mr. McFall), as I agree that this is a very important point indeed.
	The third big gain from the system is the fact that tax credits have helped to achieve a significant reduction in child poverty—700,000 children have been lifted out of relative poverty since 1997, compared with a doubling of child poverty in the previous 20 years under the Tory Government. There is recognition across the House that child poverty must be tackled. Previously, the Opposition did not acknowledge that, but they do so today, which is another reason for the broad agreement that, as the Treasury Committee said, the tax credit system is right in principle. Tax credits provide support for 20 million people—a third of the population—and assist 6 million families and just over 10 million children. Take-up is substantially higher than in any previous system of income-related financial support for families in work, and it has risen much faster than it did under previous benefit systems such as family credit. The people most likely to take up their entitlement are the low-income families who stand to benefit the most.

Stephen Timms: The hon. Member for Yeovil(Mr. Laws), in particular, has called for the introduction of a system based on income in a previous period. He is right that the need for adjustments would be removed if we did so, but he and the House must acknowledge the price that would be paid is a loss of flexibility. Interestingly, the report published yesterday included a suggestion, based on work by the Economic and Social Research Council centre for analysis of social exclusion, that, if anything, the system should be more flexible in future.

Michael Weir: I agree that flexibility is essential tothe system, but if my constituents try to provide information to officers, it is often not entered into the system or is not entered correctly so it cannot be found if there is a problem. This week, I received a letter from Revenue and Customs saying that it could not retrieve information from the system to tell me whether my constituent had been overpaid, underpaid or paid the correct amount. My constituent is beside herself with worry—there is a problem in the system, as it cannot deal with flexibility.

John McFall: On the point made by the shadow Chancellor—yes, the Chancellor is keeping an open mind, but I have tried to impress upon the Chancellor and other members of the Front-Bench team that if we go back to a fixed system, we can be sure that, asmy right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead(Mr. Field) said, there will be many, many more complaints from our constituents. The question is flexible or fixed, and I am looking for an answer from the shadow Chancellor. We must be sure that a flexible system works. That is why we need to keep an eye on it.

Stephen Timms: The overall impact of the package is broadly neutral in cost terms. When one considers the elements of it that cost money and those that gain revenue, the overall impact is broadly neutral.
	In our modern labour market, where in any year3 million people change jobs, flexibility to respond is tremendously important. That is the big benefit of the system as it has been constructed. I welcome the Treasury Committee's comments about that.
	Our strategy is to make work pay and to providereal financial support to families through tax credits. There have been problems in the early stages of implementation, but there have also been vital gains. That is why there is growing recognition—across the House, I hope—that tax credits are right in principle.

George Osborne: I am grateful to the Chief Secretary for giving way again. I sense that he is winding up. Will he deal with two specific points, which I know the Select Committee considered and Citizens Advice is concerned about? One is the statutory test and the right to appeal to an independent tribunal, which exists for other benefits. The second is the pause that the Government promised before the claw back of overpayments, to give people the right to question the Treasury's decision on that.

David Laws: The hon. Gentleman is quite right thatthe Prime Minister made a commitment that the Government have not kept. Indeed, it was a commitment that the Chancellor of the Exchequer repeated on GMTV. But our constituents have found themselves in a double lock where they have not only to demonstrate that there was error by HMRC, but to demonstrate by a very strict standard that they could not have been aware of those particular problems.

David Laws: I shall make a little progress and thengive way.
	The Chief Secretary dealt with some of the successes of the tax credit system, and 17 of the 18 lines of the Government's amendment trumpet its successes. Every hon. Member today has acknowledged that for many people, tax credits have made an enormous difference. It would have been almost unbelievable that a Government could spend £15.8 billion in a single year on means-tested benefits without benefiting anybody. The issue is that the design of the tax credits system has been fundamentally flawed, that overpayments are fundamental to the system and that they have driven into poverty many of the people whom the Government have sought to help most, as has been shown by not only the Select Committee's report, but the ombudsman's report, which has been sitting on the shelf for the best part of a year.
	The Chief Secretary and the Paymaster General would do well to read the leader article in the  Financial Times last week on the day on which the Government published the latest statistics, in which the leader writer said:
	"Compassionate governments insulate low-income hard-working families from the ravages of a global market. Enlightened governments seek such protection by rewarding work through their tax and social security systems. Arrogant governments close their ears when these policies are failing."
	One of the greatest disappointments in terms of the Government's response over the past year, and to some extent even the Chief Secretary's response today, is that there has been an arrogance and an unwillingness to accept the problems that have been created for many people on the lowest incomes throughout the country.
	The problems of the tax credits system, in terms of the loss of public money and the enormous overpayments that have had to be recovered from people on low incomes, are already well known. Many hon. Members today have already spoken, and I am sure others will later, of their own experiences of dealing with the individuals who have had these problems, many of whom have never been significantly in debt before, are baffled by the complexity of the system, and have got into these enormous debts and overpayments through no fault of their own. It is on those practical issues that I seek some reassurance from the Government today.

Stephen Timms: The hon. Gentleman's main proposal is the reintroduction of a much less flexible system, like the old family credit system based on fixed awards. He will have seen what the Treasury Committee said about that yesterday. I quote:
	"there seemed to be little support amongst our witnesses for returning to a regime of fixed awards."
	Indeed the hon. Gentleman's predecessor in his current post explicitly supported the ability of the system to be flexible in the way that it is. Does that give the hon. Gentleman any pause to reflect on the merits of the proposal that he has been running with for sometime now.

David Laws: I find the Government's position on this issue rather difficult to fathom. The Chief Secretary has said a number of times that the fixed system would have terrible disadvantages and that it would be some kind of disaster, and that was the line that the Paymaster General used to take. But at the same time they have acknowledged to the shadow Chancellor that they are considering precisely such an option and that they are keeping it under review. I remember being in this House a year ago and hearing the Paymaster General tell us how the alternatives to the then system were ridiculous; that a fixed award system would be ludicrous and that increasing the disregard to the outrageous figure of £10,000 would be enormously expensive. Yet a few months later the disregard went up from £2,500 to £25,000. The Chief Secretary would do well to acknowledge that in paragraph 52 of their report, members of the Select Committee say that they had not sought in this inquiry
	"to ask whether the model of tax credits regime which the Government has adopted is the right model."
	That is not what the Select Committee has pretended to do. The Committee also took evidence from a series of people, as the Chief Secretary will know, including one-parent families, who want to see a return to fixed awards; the Institute of Fiscal Studies, which believes that that option needs to be looked at seriously; and the Child Poverty Action Group, which has said that it believes that if the existing system cannot be made to work, there should be a major redesign. If the Chief Secretary really believes that the system of fixed awards is so flawed, why do not the Government carry out a public assessment? Why do they not commission some sort of research about other systems in the world? We have this extraordinary debate where it is hintedthat a fixed system would be unacceptable, yet the Government simultaneously say that the system is being kept under review.
	I noticed today that one of the things that the Chief Secretary is trying to do by continually coming back to the issue of a fixed award system, which was not even an aspect of the Select Committee's report, or one of the recommendations of the ombudsman, is to try to distract attention from the lack of progress on some of the major issues in the ombudsman's report, which came out a year ago. I find it extraordinary that the Chief Secretary is unable to say how many of the ombudsman's recommendations made a full year ago have been implemented. I find it extraordinary that he does not know that the principal recommendation that the ombudsman made has been rejected by the Government. It is extraordinary that the Government do not seem to have taken on board the implications of the existing system for low-income families. It is also extraordinary that, one year after the ombudsman's report, which was the most powerful critique of the impact that the tax credits system was having on some low income families and will probably never be bettered in terms of its insights into the tax credits system and its recommendations for putting it right in its existing form, a cross-party Select Committee with many thoughtful but also instinctively loyal Members of the Government, a majority Labour Committee, should be reporting that
	"we are not convinced that the Paymaster General and the Department fully realise the extent to which HMRC needs to re-focus its administrative structures for tax credits around the needs of claimants."
	It is astonishing that the Select Committee has gone on to conclude:
	"We consider it would be much more helpful if the Department were to focus on the quality of the service it provides to claimants, rather than seeking to attribute the majority of problems with the tax credits regime to error or omission on the part of claimants."
	The Select Committee refers to the Paymaster General's statement about a year ago when she attributed virtually every aspect of the overpayments to errors that other people were making, and no aspect of the overpayments to the errors that are being made by the system itself and by the Inland Revenue.

John McFall: The hon. Gentleman anticipates some of the points that I am going to make. His raising that point further underlines my objectivity on this matter.
	On increasing support for families, we now have20 million people getting support, as the Paymaster General said, involving 6 million families and10 million children. That is an increase on the results of every past policy, and the take-up rate among low earners has been 93 per cent. That is a big improvement compared with the take-up rates of 57 per cent. in the early years of family income supplement, of 62 per cent. for family credit and of 65 per cent. for working families tax credit. That is why the Select Committee has endorsed this policy.
	The Select Committee also endorses the child poverty objectives that have resulted in 700,000 children being lifted out of relative poverty, and the measures on creating adequate financial incentives to work. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury mentioned the tax burden. Like him, I look to the survey carried out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which showed that, as a result of the tax credit, there had been a large fall in the tax burden for families. The tax burden on a single-earnercouple with no children earning £21,000 has fallen from 17.3 per cent. of gross earnings in 1997 to 9.8 per cent. in 2004. That is the lowest rate for any G7 country, and it is indeed an incentive for people to get into work. The effect of the policy on children is also important, and the Select Committee report notes that the tax credit has helped to ensure that the number of families with children paying no net tax has risen from under 2.5 million to more than 3 million in 2006-07. That is a considerable improvement.
	However, I must ask whether everything is going right with the regime, and the answer is most definitely no. That is why the Treasury Committee has sought to address a number of points. Is the regime fit for purpose? Yes, in terms of the majority of people getting tax credits. However, it is not fit for purpose for the minority of people having problems with the tax credit system. That is why the Select Committee visited the tax credit office in Preston, where we looked at the way in which the regime was working in practice. Overpayments were a big issue there.
	We examined the problem of overpayments, and the staff gave us three reasons for it. The first is that people's incomes rise from one year to the next. The second is that families overestimate the extent to which their income has fallen. The third is that the provision of payments at the start of a tax year might be based on out-of-date information. Those three reasons combined account for 70 per cent. of the overpayments. I would like to think that the Select Committee has performed a service in identifying those three issues so that they can be tackled. The Select Committee also noted that 30 per cent. of the overpayments were due to delays in reporting changes in a family's circumstances.
	The Conservative and Liberal Democrat spokesmen both mentioned the arguments for either fixed or flexible systems, and I would like to say to the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws) that that subject was very much a feature of the Committee's discussions. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead(Mr. Field) gave oral evidence to the Committee in which he said that he was getting fewer complaints at his surgeries about tax credits now. I have also taken anecdotal evidence on this, and that is certainly a feature of what hon. Members tell me more widely.
	If we were to go back to a fixed system, hon. Members would have an increasing number of people coming to see us about the problems involved. I would also like to point out to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury that if we returned to a fixed system, we would not be responding to the demands of a modern labour market. That is important because 3 million people change jobs every year in a modern labour market, and each year more than 200,000 move into new or better jobs, resulting in an increase in their family income by £10,000 a year or more.
	Those are the reasons for the overpayments. I cannot stress strongly enough that, if we are to have a flexible system, overpayments will be a feature of it. So how can we manage this in a client-sensitive manner? I might be departing from what the Select Committee has said on this, but my experience is that the benefits of a flexible system are there for everyone in the family.

John McFall: The hon. Gentleman must accept that overpayments are an inherent part of a flexible system. But how can we marry such a system with a client-sensitive system? The Select Committee had that discussion with members of the unions and officials in Preston when we visited the tax credit office there, and that is the important issue for them.
	The overpayments were £2.2 billion in 2004-05 and £1.8 billion in 2005-06, and I hope that the Paymaster General will respond to this point when she windsup the debate. A breakdown is needed of those overpayments to determine what the Government's figures are. The figure of £4 billion over two years needs to be broken down.

John McFall: As I said earlier, overpayments are an integral part of the system, but it is necessary to distinguish between individuals who can make an adequate response to the Tax Credit Office about overpayments and those—perhaps people on low incomes and in distress—who cannot. However, I agree with the hon. Gentleman's second point.

John McFall: The Paymaster General dealt with a number of those problems in the pre-Budget report, and I am sure that she will discuss them later.
	End-of-year adjustments feature in any flexible system. The only way in which to eliminate overpayments is to have a fixed system in which eligibility is based on the previous year's income and circumstances, and I certainly do not want to go down that road.
	The Treasury Committee said that there should be a shift in the culture of HMRC if the tax credits system was to be a success. HMRC conducted a review of the merger of the two departments, which the Select Committee recommended to the Government. As has been pointed out, there are two entirely different cultures, and the client-centred culture has not been predominant. That must be addressed, and I hope that David Varney, HMRC's chief executive, and his colleagues will read the report with that constructive criticism in mind.
	I should like the Paymaster General to think about what the Committee said about official error. The Committee believes that it has been a cause of overpayments in a significant number of cases, and that the Government should publish a complete analysis of incidences. There are also the errors caused by the IT system, which a number of Members have mentioned. Constituents have come to me about it. After our visit to Preston, the reason is obvious to us. When a client telephones a civil servant who then consults a computer, not all the information on the client will be on that computer. If decisions are being made on the basis of incomplete information, we can be sure that the system will be made worse. The IT problem must be addressed as a matter of urgency.
	When we visited Preston, we learned that only about 25 per cent. of claims went straight through the automated system with no need for manual intervention. About 80 per cent. of new claims required intervention, and it was required by about30 to 35 per cent. of claims for renewal. The Public and Commercial Services Union told us that the Government initially intended the "rapid data capture" process—the conversion of written information from application forms into electronic data—to handle about 90 per cent. of claims without further need for human intervention. My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, Central (Jim Cousins) mentioned staff numbers, and those figures make his point. There is an urgent need to keep staff at the Tax Credit Office.
	A recurring theme was the IT system's lack of flexibility, and the difficulty of correcting a mistake once it had been entered into the system. Staff may—as they told us—accept that the information is wrong, but may still be unable to correct the error.
	The Committee also referred to fraud, error and organised crime. When the Paymaster General appeared before the Committee, I personally interrogated her on issues relating to staff from the Department of Work and Pensions and from Network Rail. HMRC has closed the e-portal and it feels that the fraud issue can be addressed, but there is still a problem over national insurance numbers. Vigilance is needed.

John McFall: My hon. Friend makes a good point. I remind the Paymaster General that David Varney, the HMRC chief executive, contacted us and offered us a confidential briefing. However, that would naturally have meant that we could not open our mouths at any future date. As politicians and public representatives, we were not prepared to enter into any such negotiation.
	There is a credibility problem. There is, perhaps, a perception of impropriety. There may have been no impropriety, but the position is far from satisfactory, and my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, East(Mr. Mudie) has done us a service by referring to it.
	The Committee welcomed the increase in disregard from £2,500 to £25,000, but the Government say that they expect the increase to reduce the current level of overpayments by a third. That suggests that the remaining two thirds of overpayments arise as a result of changes in claimants' circumstances other than increases in income. Consequently, over the next few years—although the tax credits regime may see a decrease in the number of overpayments—levels are likely to continue to be high. At the same time, claimants' problems may well become increasingly complex as their case histories within the regime lengthen. I should like the Paymaster General to examine that issue, as well the important issues of the pause and the referral to an independent tribunal for appeal. We have mentioned both those issues.

John McFall: I agree entirely. I do not know the particular circumstances of the case, but I am willing to take my hon. Friend's word on it. However, as I said, we have to distinguish between those who have been overpaid and can pay the money back adequately, and those low-income families who are experiencing hardship and are in distress. As he says, a hardship team is essential in determining that, and I hope that the Paymaster General considers the issue.
	I think that I have exhausted all possible interventions and finish on three things mentioned earlier. First, on the support for families, more families are getting the credit. Secondly, we are making progress on child poverty targets. Thirdly, on incentives to work, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, East mentioned young people who are unemployed. I am a former school teacher. When I first took up teaching, a lot of the kids whom I taught in the area where I lived went on not to work, but to unemployment. I would meet some of them five, 10 years later. They would be with their wife or kids, pushing a pram, and I would dread asking, "What are you doing?" I was reluctant to do that. Now I can walk down my high street and ask people what they are doing with more confidence and more authority because more people are in work.
	We need a flexible system that responds to people's needs and provides incentives to work, especiallyfor young people, because we must rememberthat unemployment is the single most important determinant of poverty. If we can have such a system, warts and all, it deserves our support. However, we will keep our critical eye on the Paymaster General over the next few months. We will not let up and will work as a team to ensure that we get the system right.

Roger Gale: My hon. Friend highlights a point that has been made time and again in our debate. You will be relieved to know, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that I do not propose to read out all the 106 cases with which I have dealt. Twenty-nine are still live, many have been outstanding for more than two years, one has been referred to the adjudicator, and eight more will have to be referred to the adjudicator. Because of our debate, I plucked out 12 cases from the 29 live ones and discovered that there was an average repayment claim of £2,190 per household, a lowest figure of £611 and a highest figure of £4,262.
	By implication, we are talking about some of the poorest, most underprivileged families in the country. Sadly, the per capita level of deprivation in North Thanet, in east Kent, is still among the highest inthe United Kingdom. Can any Member begin to contemplate the terror and misery felt by a young man or woman who picks off the doormat a bill for £4,000, when they do not have 4,000 pence in the bank, and such money as they did have has long been spent on household and living essentials? How can the Treasury and the chairman of the Revenue and Customs, who was rewarded with a knighthood for his incompetence, dare to justify this sort of situation? We know how, because in response to another constituency case, a Revenue and Customs senior business manager wrote to me on 1 June and said:
	"Overpayments are sometimes inevitable in a flexible system as changes in circumstances which reduce entitlement can happen at any time in the year."
	Forgive me, but the right hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Mr. McFall) has referred over and over again to the wonderfully flexible system. The system is flexible, in so far as I can see, in terms of the number of excuses that it allows Revenue and Customs to generate for its failures, but it is not responsive to data input—I think that that is the expression.
	In evidence to the Treasury Committee, the Paymaster General said with tremendous and accustomed candour:
	"I am not a computer person."
	The problem is that not only is the right hon. Lady not a computer person, but so far I can see, the people responsible for the installation and maintenance of the Treasury's computers are not computer people either—they are not capable of getting it right—and the result is a Treasury Committee report that is absolutely scathing in its determination.
	We are dealing with real people. Teething troubles have been referred to—if there are such troubles, all I can say is that second teeth are coming through, because the programme is now three years old. The Treasury team responsible, including the Paymaster General and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, have had three years to get it right.
	Members of Parliament continue to receive cases of hardship and misery, generated by a scheme that we were told would solve people's problems and help them out of debt, poverty and hardship and back into work. For a third of the people involved in the scheme, who are supposedly receiving money as beneficiaries, the reverse is the case—it is creating problems and causing hardship. It hurts me to have to say this, but frankly, if the chairman of Revenue and Customs and the Treasury team responsible for the scheme cannot get it right after three years, they should move over and make way for someone who can.

Danny Alexander: The hon. Lady rightly sets out the objectives for the system, but major problems are caused by the high degree of error and incompetence, and they would make it worth while investigating returning to a system of fixed awards. The experience of my constituents is that it is no longer worth the trouble of engaging with the tax credits system—which was set up to help them—because the incompetence has been going on for three years and they are sickof it.

Sally Keeble: The hon. Gentleman makes the fair point that if a system is constantly run down, people disengage from it. It is important therefore to ensure that the public understand that the system can make a real difference to their life chances. I accept that it is complicated, and people may need help with working their way through it. The Committee's report contains important recommendations with which, as a member of the Committee, I wholeheartedly concur. We must recognise that if we are to give people a hand up, not a hand out—to use one of our old phrases—we must ensure that we provide them with the kind of support that will help them best in their present circumstances, not the circumstances in which they were last year.
	The system is important because of what it has done for women, and that is why we must get the administration of it right. I take second place to nobody in criticising the administration and the amount of fraud. The system was designed to give a real chance to people on low and average incomes—and in some cases, people with fairly high earnings but large family commitments—to get children out of poverty and to provide some dignity for women who had been kept out of work and at home on benefits for many years, and it is a scandal that it is hampered by administration problems and fraud. That is why Labour Members are so concerned about the administration and why the Committee's report has received so much attention. It is certainly an excellent report.
	Much of the ground has already been covered and other hon. Members wish to speak, so I shall make only a few points. The staff have received much criticism, and when we visited them in Preston it was clear that they have thought a lot about the issues and learned a lot from doing so. Some of the managers had done superb jobs in sorting out their targeting and working out ways to deal with the administrative problems. That deserves to be recognised, and the staff should be congratulated on their work. The system is complex and people who are not used to it or to dealing with benefits of this type can find it difficult to come to terms with. Such problems need to be resolved, but it is important that we do not merely castigate the staff for what has happened.
	The report identifies various problems, but other challenges—such as the difficulty of reporting a change in circumstances—remain. The report spends a lot of time talking about how people's income can vary in-year. That is understandable when people working shifts or in temporary jobs have to adjust their hours for school holidays and so on. However, evidence gathered for the report made it clear that people's lives change. We must accept that families break up and that people find new partners. New babies get born and children grow up, moving from nursery school to their main school and then out to work.
	All those changes can have an impact on a person's tax credit claim. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor announced changes to the system in his Budget statement, and their implementation must take account of people's changing circumstances. I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Paymaster General is more familiar with the details than I am, but I think that one of the proposals is that a change in circumstances will have to be reported in one month rather than in three months. Staff must be geared up and ready to deal with such changes, and claimants must also be aware of what they have to do. They must be able to manage what can be quite a complicated process, as it is not always clear that a change in circumstances will be permanent.
	In addition, the relevant computer systems must be geared up to deal with the requirement that changesin circumstances are reported more quickly. It is important, too, that people who advise claimants understand the changes.
	The Treasury Committee also talks about the ombudsman's recommendation about an independent appeals system, and makes it clear that it wants to see a report on the practicalities involved. I hope that HMRC can look into the matter very carefully and make a report available quickly, because it is really important to ensure that a paper chase, once begun, does not proliferate.
	The hon. Member for North Thanet (Mr. Gale) mentioned the arguments that people can get into, and the sequence of events is familiar to all hon. Members. When a person in receipt of a tax credit award undergoes a change in circumstances, he or she is likely to say that the award was wrong in the first place. Details of the changes are fed through the system, making the first award even more wrong and rendering incorrect any award made subsequently. The problem then is that it is very difficult to alter the first award, with the result that a paper chase begins that goes on and on. It can take an inordinately long time to resolve such a problem.
	Any appeals system has to be appropriate. It must arrive at the right decision and provide proper redress, but it also has to be quite fast. It must not add to the paper chase—it is very important that the appeals system makes things better rather than worse. I hope that the HMRC report on an independent appeals system is made available to hon. Members, and that it is prepared very quickly.
	My final point has to do with child care, an element in the debate that has been overlooked so far. It is important that we remember that the flexible tax credits system recognises the cost of caring for children. It is not perfect, but for the first time ever women can claim their child care costs and go out to work.
	In the early days of the system that led to some fraud, but the new process has helped a bit. Some problems remain, such as how to deal with holidays and what mature students with children can do about their child care costs. However, it is really important that, as we move forward, we retain the recognition that a woman might need only a small amount of money in tax credits because she can earn reasonably well, but she can earn well only if all her child care costs are paid. She might need only a few pounds a week in tax credits, but she will need £100 a week or more in child care costs. I hope that that is recognised.
	I hope that it is also recognised that, because that is the case, I have constituents who have received huge overpayments because of the child care element. I am sure that other hon. Members have such constituents, too. I ask that that be looked at—particularly in any future proposals that the Treasury makes—to make sure that women can get their child care costs, and also that, if mistakes are made, women do not suddenly find themselves plunged into paying large amounts of money because of miscalculations on child care, especially when child care costs sometimes do not take account of holidays and some of the difficulties that women have.
	I know that Conservative Members do not like being told about things that happened in the past. Fortunately, it is a long time since the last Tory Government. However, I remember hundreds of people being laid off work and being put on benefits in the middle of one of the worst of the Tory recessionsin Birmingham. That was in the days before computers—or before large-scale computers. The then Department of Health and Social Security system—all the offices in Birmingham—shut down in a strike because people were overloaded. It was not just that the admin did not work; it shut down completely. For about nine months, people got nothing. Thatwas an example of the Conservative Government administering financial support to people who were out of work because of the recession that the Conservative Government created, and who were in dire poverty. The suffering was severe, which is one reason why Labour Members think twice when they hear Conservative Members talking about benefits for people on low incomes.
	As I say, I will be second to none in criticising maladministration and fraud in the benefits system. Will my right hon. Friend the Paymaster General make sure that we have a welfare system that does not act as a kind of opium of the masses in keeping them in unemployment, but enables people to transform their lives, go out to work and have proper child care for their children, and create a much better future for their families?

Greg Clark: There is no perfect system of welfare. The system always involves choices. There is no utopia that we can ever hope to achieve. Because those choices have to be made, it is important that they should be debated properly and fully in Parliament. Those choices are fundamental to the designs of systems. There is the choice to provide incentives for people to stay in work—that extends in-work benefits up the income scale to the levels that we have. That is a choice that has to be made. We can have the simplicity of universalism in benefits, but that comes at a cost. All those questions need to be discussed fully and properly. What has been a bit disappointing in the contributions from Labour Members is how unwilling they have been to have a proper and open debate about the changes. Instead, they have defended a system that reflects some policy choices that can and should be questioned. The Select Committee report has done that.
	It is important to address three points in particular. First, there is the question of overpayments. Secondly, there is the complexity of the system and, thirdly, there is the effect of the tax credit system on low pay. When it comes to the level of overpayments, let none of us be under any illusions. The overpayments are a direct consequence of the policy. The tax credit system is engaged in bringing together two completely different policies: the tax system, which has traditionally taken a look at income on an annual basis, and the welfare system, which takes a much shorter term—often week by week—looks at what claimants need. Needless to say, putting those two things together involves exactly the type of problems that we have seen and that are intrinsic in that system. That is why that requires debating.
	Quite reasonably, the Government have recognised the problem and increased the disregard from £2,500 a year to £25,000. No doubt that will help to solve the problem. It is, however, important that we assess whether the change represents value for money, but the Government have consistently refused to allow us to make such an assessment.
	When the disregard was set at £2,500, the Treasury was able to estimate that it would cost £800 million. When the disregard was increased tenfold to £25,000, similar figures, miraculously, could not be produced and no assessment could be given—or so we thought. When the Public Accounts Committee questioned senior officials in Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs on the matter, it emerged, after a degree of probing, that such estimates had been produced. However, presumably because it would have been inconvenient to Treasury Ministers if the figures were disclosed, the information was not put in the public domain, although we know that it is available.
	The Institute for Fiscal Studies, a well-respected think-tank that does valuable work to inform all parliamentarians about the technical aspects of the tax system, was eager to obtain the information so that it could make what, as every hon. Member wouldagree, would be an independent assessment of the consequences of the change, but its request was refused. HMRC sent the IFS an unbelievable letter in which it disclosed that it had information about the cost of the increased disregard, but refused, on freedom of information grounds, to give it. The letter read:
	"In applying this exemption we had to balance the public interest in withholding the information against the public interest in disclosing the information."
	I have no idea what the public interest in withholding the information can be. If the Paymaster General wishes to explain it to me, I will be happy to take her intervention, but she is, perhaps conveniently, buried in her paperwork, as ever.
	We are able to make an estimate of the figure because we know that the overpayments in the most recent financial year amounted to some £1.8 billion. It is argued that the overpayments reflect several factors, of which changes to income in-year is but one, and that it is impossible to work out the situation, although calculations have been done. However, in the qualification of the annual report and accounts of the Inland Revenue, the Comptroller and Auditor General was able to make an assessment of the reasons for the overpayments. In the 2004-05 accounts, the CAG said that the
	"Total overpayments for 2003/4 were mainly because family income had increased by more than the £2,500 disregard".
	In other words, the CAG, who is an unimpeachable figure, says that the main contribution to the then£2.2 billion figure, which is now £1.8 billion, was in-year changes in income. If the Paymaster General wishes to correct Sir John Bourn on the record, I will happily give her the opportunity to do so, but I see, again, that she chooses not to intervene. The matter is important. If we interpret the CAG's assessment as generously as possibly by regarding "mainly" as constituting half the expenditure, the relevant figure is well over £1 billion a year and could be as high as£1.8 billion.
	I said at the beginning of my speech that the welfare system involves policy choices. We should be able to debate in both Select Committee and the Chamber whether £1 billion of Government expenditure is best applied to simplifying the system in such a way, or whether, for example, we should use it to increase child benefit by £140 for each family, which would be an alternative. Ministers are disgracefully denying us the opportunity to exercise such scrutiny. Although I understand the political interest in doing such a thing, I do not see the public interest.

Sally Keeble: If the hon. Gentleman reads the report, it works out that 30 per cent. of the overpayments are due to changes in income, roughly 30 per cent. due to changes in circumstances, and about 15 per cent. each to two other factors. That does not mean that therecan then be a transfer into values. There is an interrelationship between the different elements, so the conclusion is wrong.

Greg Clark: The hon. Lady has got the wrong end of the stick. People who cannot earn enough to keep themselves deserve to be supported, but we should not congratulate ourselves, as every year, more and more people have jobs that pay so little that their earnings need to be topped up by the state. However, support should be available.
	Unusually for a Conservative Member, I endorse the campaign by the Transport and General Workers Union on low pay in the cleaning industry, in which it points out that, for example, 60 per cent. of cleaners employed in the City of London earn less than £5.50 an hour. It is unacceptable for employers who make do very well from large profits and who depend on those services to get away with poverty pay. We should not accept such behaviour, and Government Members should not accept it either. We need to look seriously at the tax credit system and its interaction with the minimum wage if we are to address the argument of the eminent academic Jonathan Bradshaw of the university of York:
	"At the moment the state is playing a vital part in supporting market earnings. At no time in our history has it had to do more...The taxpayer is providing a large subsidy to low-paying employers and no doubt many are laughing all the way to their shareholders".
	In conclusion, this is such an important issue thatit is disappointing that the Government have complacently defended the present position. We need to debate these things more thoroughly and positively. If the words of my right hon. and hon. Friends and I do not carry any weight with Treasury Ministers, perhaps the words of the right hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn) will do so. In March, he said that we need to
	"tackle the root causes, not the symptoms. That must mean moving beyond simply correcting low wages and family poverty after the event, towards policies that spread opportunity and help people to realise their own aspirations for progress."—[ Official Report, 28 March 2006; Vol. 444, c. 710.]
	Conservative Members certainly share those aspirations, and I hope that when she replies to our debate, the Paymaster General will say that the Government do so, too.

Mark Francois: It is a genuine pleasure to sum up the debate today for Her Majesty's Opposition and to highlight what has become the shambles of the tax credits system as administeredby the Government. The system now costs some£16 billion a year, or the equivalent of 5p on the standard rate of income tax. It incorporates some6 million families, of which some 2 million were overpaid in 2004-05, while at the same time just under1 million families were underpaid. In other words, nearly half of all the payments in the entire system were incorrect. I therefore welcome the Chief Secretary's admission that the system has serious problems, and his acceptance this afternoon that there is now "a consensus" that tax credits should be retained. It was important that the Government accepted that there was a consensus to retain them, and we welcome that.
	However, the tax credits system, as it is currently configured, is seriously flawed. It is prone to fraud and it is also far too complicated, to the extent that many of the claimants who use it do not fully understand what they are claiming, many of the staff who administer it do not really comprehend it properly, and it is all based around a computer system that itself is highly unreliable, as was brought out clearly in the typically punchy contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Mr. Gale). That serves only to compound the mistakes in the system itself.
	The Government's defence, as outlined in their hurried written statement that was rushed out on Monday, is essentially that the package of remedial measures announced in the December pre-Budget report will put things right. But six months on, they still refuse to tell the House what the package will really cost, and even then, they admit that this will reduce the overpayments by only a third, so well over 1 million families will still be overpaid even when the package is fully up and running. The PBR package does not address the problems at the heart of the current system—namely, its excessive complexity and its dependence on unreliable information technology.  [Interruption.] The Chief Secretary has returned just in time for me to welcome his acknowledgement of our consensus. In effect, the PBR package is an attempt to place a sticking plaster over what has become a gaping wound.
	Since the new, and supposedly more flexible, system was introduced in 2003, a series of independent reports has subsequently criticised the operation of the Chancellor's system. In June 2005, after receiving thousands of individual complaints about the new system, the parliamentary ombudsman produced a report that concluded:
	"A review of all the cases referred to the Ombudsman shows that the greatest difficulties are suffered by the core group that the tax credit system is aimed at helping, mainly families on low incomes."
	In September 2005, the Public Accounts Committee looked at the system and attacked its complexity. It concluded:
	"The Government intended the new tax credits to provide a system that was simple for people to understand and to administer. In practice, many people have found the scheme difficult to understand. Many have complained to the Inland Revenue about the system and the frustration and misery it has caused to claimants."
	We heard that reflected on both sides of the House in our debate this afternoon.
	In January 2006, after reviewing the ombudsman's findings, the Public Administration Committee delivered the following damning verdict on the IT system, which underlines the current tax credits system. It said:
	"We are concerned that the IT system which is supposed to enable an efficient delivery of the scheme has in fact been a root cause, first of creating some of the problems which have led to the criticism and complaints about the scheme and then of acting as a barrier to resolving them quickly."
	Then, in April 2006, we had a scathing report by the Public Accounts Committee that looked at the fraud and errors in the system, including overpayments that totalled £1.8 billion in 2004-05. It concluded:
	"The Department does not have reliable or up to date information on levels of claimant error and fraud in tax credits. The absence of this information and its analysis seriously impairs the Department's management of the schemes and its ability to safeguard taxpayers' money".
	Despite that, Ministers at all levels in the Treasury keep trying to insist in the media that the system is working well.
	Can the Paymaster General tell us the true extent of the fraud that is now inherent in the tax credits system? We were promised those figures in the spring—let us have them now. Picking up on what my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) cleverly pointed out, we still have not had the cost of the tenfold increase in the disregard, and we are now told that it is not in the public interest to tell us, as elected Members of Parliament, what that figure is. Will the Paymaster General tell us why?
	Only yesterday we had, as the right hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Mr. McFall) said, a very objective report from the Treasury Committee, which looked in great detail at the administration of the system and concluded:
	"It is obvious to us that the Paymaster General's account makes no reference to causes of overpayments which have arisen as a consequence of the Department's own processes—for example official error and IT systems error. Rather, the Paymaster General has referred only to those causes of overpayments which can be attributed to claimant error or omission, or to the design of the tax credits regime, or a combination of both."
	All these critical reports, in just two years, represent a litany of failure, and it is a failure lodged firmly on the doorstep of No. 11 Downing street.
	There is also a growing consensus among the voluntary sector that the current system does not work properly. As we have heard, the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux—citizens advice bureaux now advise tax credit claimants as a major part of their work load—provided a frank commentary on the problems in the system:
	"Last year Citizens Advice Bureaux across the UK advised on around 150,000 tax credit problems. CAB experience is that the recovery of overpayments has caused significant hardship to many families as payments have stopped without warning or explanation."
	Whereas, for those who read  The Guardian, the Reverend Paul Nicholas, chairman of the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust, was quoted in the paper this week as follows:
	"Enforcement is driven by computers that have no means of identifying the illiterate, blind, disabled, mentally or chronically ill"—
	and in some cases, even dead. He concludes that
	"an overpayment of tax credits can lead to a downward spiral of a family's fortunes into a morass of debt."
	Even the Fabian Society has acknowledged that the system is not working. In its report, "Narrowing the Gap", issued earlier this year, it admitted that the system had faults and that tax credits were associated with "complexity and administrative problems". Now it has a sleeper within the Treasury arguing that agenda, as the report was launched by none other than the Economic Secretary—and where is he?
	It needs to be remembered that this system was established to assist people on low incomes. In many cases, it is doing precisely the opposite. It needs to be reformed in order to continue to provide help to people who need it but without driving them to distraction in the process. As far as the current configuration of tax credits is concerned, the Treasury is shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic, with the Economic Secretary particularly desperate to get one before they all disappear.
	Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that the architect of this system is the Chancellor himself, who famously said in the mid-1990s that he wanted to abolish means-testing. Yet the current system is the apotheosis of that concept, against which there is now an overwhelming consensus that it needs to be reformed. The Prime Minister referred at Prime Minister's questions earlier this afternoon to: "Working families tax credit, which makes work pay for people."
	Working families tax credit was abolished three years ago. That is the old system. We are debating the new one. The Chancellor has created a system that is so complicated that even the Prime Minister does not understand it, so what hope is there for a single mother, who perhaps has not had a strong financial education, living on a run-down council estate struggling to fill in the forms and deal with the bureaucracy that the Select Committee identified?
	The greatest shame is that the system was the Chancellor's personal creation. It was his pet project above all others. Yet when the day came for him to be held to account, what did the iron Chancellor do? He ran away. Unusually, the Government's amendment has not been selected, so hon. Members have a clear choice. They can put up with the shambles that is the current system, and go along with the fact that the Chancellor invented it but would not come and defend it, or they can join us in the Lobby and protest against a system that drives ordinary working families to distraction. I hope that they will do the latter.

Dawn Primarolo: We have had another interesting debate on tax credits. As always, the Conservatives miss the point—about tackling child poverty, helping those with volatile incomes and helping people into work.
	I welcome the Treasury Committee report and congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire (Mr. McFall), not only on steering through that helpful contribution to the general debate, but on presenting the outstanding issues so comprehensively and in such a considered way today.
	The debate divided into two halves. The first dealt with administration and the second considered a flexible system—the tax credit system as it is now—versus a fixed system. I shall revert to those points later.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire specifically mentioned the pause or the 30 days and the appeals process. I shall respond to those points shortly. He also made it clear that Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs must put the needs of the claimants first. I agree with him and the Committee. He also said that there must be a shift in the fundamental culture of HMRC if tax credits are to be a success. I agree with him about that and so does the Department, as the report acknowledges.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) congratulated the staff on their commitment and recognition of the challenges and the changes that they needed to make.
	The hon. Member for North Thanet (Mr. Gale) made several things absolutely clear but I shall pick on one of them. He said that the system was about people. I could not agree more. He knows that I have made it clear both in private meetings and in exchanges across the Floor that it is crucial to do what needs to be done to take forward a basically sound policy and ensure that its administration is right.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North also highlighted the challenges that remained to be met of the changing circumstances that people experience in their lives and the accuracy and swiftness of the Department's response. She made important points about child care, to which I want to refer.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) echoed the point about the important contribution that tax credits have made in his constituency and in constituencies throughout the country.
	Let us be clear: the tax credits deliver three key achievements. They improve incentives to work, they reduce tax on low to middle income families, they help dramatically to reduce child poverty and they have played a major role in helping people into work and to move up the employment ladder, ensuring that work pays over benefits.
	I am not surprised that a party that presided over doubling child poverty when in power attaches so little credit to those achievements. When we seek a consensus in the Chamber—the consensus to whichmy right hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire referred—it is to get all Opposition parties to commit themselves to the principle of eradicating child poverty and the practical means of achieving that. Every time the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats were challenged by Labour Members this afternoon, they were unable to say how they would match the huge contribution that tax credits have made to this important debate.
	Let us remind ourselves of that contribution. A couple with two children moving into full-time work on the national minimum wage will be £41 a week better off, compared with £34 in 1997. A lone parent—and I can assure hon. Members that they can read and write—with two children moving into full-time work on the national minimum wage will be £76 a week better off, compared with £54 in 1997. A single person without children moving into full-time work on the national minimum wage will be £58 a week better off, compared with £39 a week in 1997.
	Tax credits are central to reducing the tax on low and middle-income families, as the recent OECD study shows. The tax paid by a couple with two children earning £21,000 a year has fallen from 17.3 per cent. of gross earnings in 1997 to 9.8 per cent. in 2004. That is the lowest rate in any G7 country. In the UK, a single-earner family with two children can now earn just under two thirds of the average wage before they start to pay any tax. Those are the benefits of tax credits. That is the contribution that is being made by a policy that the Treasury Committee unanimously agreed in principle was the right way to proceed. It has reduced poverty and raised children out of living on absolute low incomes.
	Are families responding to this in a positive way? We have only to look at the take-up figures to see the answer. In the first year, 93 per cent. of families on an annual income below £10,000—that is low pay by any definition—claimed their entitlement, compared with 50 per cent. in the early years of family income supplement, and 57 per cent. for family credit.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire asked about appeals and aboutthe pause. On the latter point, the Departmententirely supports in principle the ombudsman's recommendation to give taxpayers notice before commencing recovery—the so-called 30 days—and we are considering how we can integrate such a pause into the information technology system without jeopardising it. On appeals, we are exploring with the adjudicator's office the feasibility of introducing a fast-track process to provide claimants with the timely, accurate response that my right hon. Friend described. We have done that in close consultation with the ombudsman, who circulated a letter to every Member of this House on 27 March 2006 stating:
	"Since I published that report, my staff and I have had regular discussions at senior level with staff in the Revenue, including the Tax Credit Office and the Adjudicator's Office."
	Those matters are being taken forward.
	The key objective in tackling poverty is to consider how the needs of families—especially low-income families—change, and how we can respond to those changes. We know that their incomes are volatile. More than a quarter of households analysed by Professor John Hills had erratic and high levels of income changes. The statistics for tax credits show that1 million families saw their income fall between 2003 and 2004, and 700,000 of them would have been worse off under a fixed system. We would have to bear that in mind if we went back to a fixed award system. They would not have received the extra money that tax credits provide for them. We need that flexibility, and of course that means that there sometimes has to be an end of year adjustment. Let us keep this in perspective, however. Fifty-four per cent. of the overpayments are less than £500, and 31 per cent. are less than £200.
	In 1997, only 800,000 families received family credit; 6 million now receive tax credits. In 1997, only 50 per cent. take-up was achieved; now take-up is 93 per cent. among the poorest families. Today the income tax liability of 3 million families has been effectively wiped out by tax credits which ensure that they can use their money to spend on their families.
	The consensus that we seek today is one that includes the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. We seek a commitment to the eradication of child poverty, a commitment to recognising that people have volatile incomes, and a commitment to willing the means. Today the Conservatives failed in that regard. That is no surprise in the case of a party that presided over child poverty in the 1990s.
	 Question put, That the original words stand part of the Question—
	 The House proceeded to a Division.

VOLUNTEERS AND CARERS

Derek Conway: My hon. Friend's support for the voluntary sector is renowned in the House and I am delighted that he is opening the debate. Will he recall that volunteers in the animal welfare sector—especially the 10,000 who do so for the organisation to which I am connected, Cats Protection—make a commitment not once a week or once a month but, because they are dealing with live animals, every day? Those who volunteer to help animals, especially cats and dogs, make a seven-day-a-week commitment, and it is all the more remarkablefor it.

Andy Reed: I do not wish to diminish the work done by a wide variety of organisations, and I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will mention many of them, but will he recognise that 26 per cent. of all volunteers work in sport? Some6 million people volunteer in sport regularly, and I speak with a slight vested interest as chair of the National Strategic Partnership for Volunteering in Sport, which brings them all together. The hon. Gentleman could also give us some indication of his own prowess at sport with his run earlier today in the Westminster mile.

Alistair Burt: My hon. Friend is right. He makes the point that voluntary activity to help disadvantaged people is not confined to urban areas but is also effective in rural areas. He mentions the time commitment required of those who work and train with youngsters in the way described by the hon. Member for Loughborough. I pay tribute to the people in my hon. Friend's constituency who devote so much time to that—and especially to those who are working to build up yet another wonderful Lancashire cricket team that will win more trophies.
	What is the economic worth of voluntary activity, quite apart from the personal and social benefits that it confers? People who volunteer formally tend to spend about eight hours a month on voluntary work. That adds up to 1.9 billion hours of work—about the same as that done by 1 million full-time workers. At the national average wage, that contribution is worth£22 billion a year.
	There is no possibility that that amount of effort could be taken over by the state or people in the paid sector. It could not be afforded, so the voluntary contribution that people make constitutes an exceptional addition to this country's national life. We should all salute and celebrate it.

Alistair Burt: It is exactly as the hon. Lady says. It is still a sign of hope that the national reaction has been so intense and that we all recognise that behaviour as abhorrent. The worry is that, over the years, experience has tended to show that a dreadful story one year might become commonplace the next. We are all striving to avoid that.
	I know that a number of Members will seek to catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to talk about people in their constituency or their experiences of volunteering with others, so that the House can get a flavour of what is behind the statistics. Volunteers week has been taken up by colleagues on this side of the House—as I am sure that it has been on the other side—as a particular opportunity to take part in or support voluntary activities. My colleagues have been involved in quite a range of activities. My hon. Friend the Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) has been helping West Norfolk Disability Information Service. My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham(Mrs. Lait) is visiting her Sure Start project in Penge to catch up on progress. My hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell) sent round a helpful note of international development organisations that were looking for support and he is contributing some time. My hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet(Mr. Gale) has volunteered to help FARM-Africa. Colleagues have done a range of things.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Meriden(Mrs. Spelman), my boss, has given me information about supporting a trip to Germany by a football team—this one supported by newspapers—from the Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Trust, which comprises those with mental health difficulties. They are playing in Germany in a round-robin tournament that involves other teams comprising fans supporting Germany or England. My hon. Friend lent a hand when some of that squad showed the giant banner that they have created in this country, which they intend to give to their German hosts when they go to Germany. All of us in this place could come up with equally interesting stories and I hope that we do.

Alistair Burt: My hon. Friend's expertise with his local newspapers is well known, especially by hon. Members who attend the end-of-term Adjournment debates, when he regularly wins the prize for naming the most constituents and linking them with his local papers. He makes a fair point about the difficulties that we have when choosing from among the causes that we are asked to support.
	As far as my experience of support volunteering week is concerned—I raise this as an example of something in which we are all involved—I express my thanks to Gary Bishop, who is a church leader in Openshaw, Manchester, in the constituency of the hon. Member for Manchester, Central (Tony Lloyd). Gary is involved in the Eden project, which is a Christian-based initiative that has been operating in Manchester for several years. The project is especially extraordinary because it has asked young people to commit up to five years of their lives to live and work in some of the most deprived communities in the city. That enables them to become part of the community so that they can stimulate and support the personal and human development that is often necessary in places where there has been little family stability and where hopes and aspirations can be low, with self-esteem lower still.
	The name of Bob Holman is known to many hon. Members because of his work on poverty. He identified that one of the key features of estates in difficulty is that when anyone gets a job or tries to improve themselves, they move out of the estate, thus depriving it of natural community leaders and people who might provide stability and focus for others. His life of commitment in Easterhouse in Glasgow has been the inspiration for many, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green(Mr. Duncan Smith), whose work on social justice is proving to be a significant contribution to politics.
	Members of the Eden project are working in Manchester in much the same way. Two of the estates in the area are classified as the 11th and 12th most deprived areas out of the 32,482 in the United Kingdom. Through a series of projects—including supporting mothers and children, home visiting, parents survival and family intervention, working with youths in clubs and on the streets, and providing after-school clubs, Sunday supper clubs and other opportunities—the Eden project and those who work with it are putting their time and effort into unglamorous and difficult work. It can be harder to ask volunteers to give their time to some projects than others. There are six staff, but 30 volunteers. Eachof their stories is inspirational, but they would acknowledge that they are only representative of many more people working throughout the country.
	Pete had the call to move from Leicester to Manchester to be involved in the community. He works in a Sure Start project and gives spare time to the community. Hannah is married to Gary. She came to Manchester, where she qualified as a nurse. Her daily work is as a district nurse in the area of need, but she still finds time to volunteer as a family support worker, when she works mostly with people with drug or alcohol misuse problems.
	Unlike those who have moved from other areas to Manchester, Sinead, at 18, has always lived in the community. She got involved with Eden when it began to work with her and her friends, and now she is qualified as a nursery nurse, but spends extra time volunteering with families and children in the community.
	Shannon, at 15, is even younger and is still at school, yet she has learned that she has a gift for working with and leading other youngsters in the area. I think that the project, and the work being done by Andy Hawthorn and others in Manchester, is remarkable, given the commitment that they have shown in becoming embedded in an area.
	What has brought these volunteers to work in that place is no different from what has brought others to work in other areas—they recognise the need to help others. At the same time, they say how much they themselves have grown and developed through contributing voluntarily: getting involved with a simple and often repeated statement. They aim to ensure that their work is sustainable. Being able to lead youngsters such as Shannon and Sinead into positions of responsibility is a key objective. It is not merely that an elastoplast is being applied to the wound. These volunteers are participating in long-term care and recovery.
	Although the multiple problems that the estate and those who live on it may face can be daunting at times, volunteers gain strength from working with each other and supporting each other through difficult times. I suspect that that is a common feature among those who work in difficult areas of society.

Andy Reed: I have also visited the Eden project. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will agree that one of the project's most impressive points is that unlike some of us who volunteer—I help with my local Beavers group; we go in, we do it and we go away—the commitment shown by the volunteers whom we are talking about is that they live in the communities in which they aim to serve. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we should try to replicate such a model as far as possible? It is not something that we can force, but would not it be great if the hope that such Christian groups have achieved in being part of the communities in which they serve could be models for the future?

Edward Miliband: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt). He spoke as someone who cares passionately about carers and volunteering, and he will no doubt make an important contribution to the Neuberger commission, the results of which we look forward to.
	I have been in my job as Minister with responsibility for the third sector in the Cabinet Office for a month or so, and I am delighted to have this opportunity to set out the Government's approach and future plans. We have good reason to be optimistic about the ethic of volunteering in this country. Next year, the new Office of the Third Sector will be investing £65 million a year directly in the infrastructure of volunteering programmes. Millennium Volunteers saw a transformation of youth volunteering in this country, engaging almost a quarter of a million young people. Today 20.4 million men and women in our country volunteer regularly, up from18.4 million in 2001, a rise in both formal and informal volunteering.
	We need to go further. We have just launched V, the independent body that will build on the work of the Millennium Volunteers and is tasked with recruiting a million more youth volunteers. For carers too, there is more to do. There are more resources and better legislation, and the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis), who has responsibility for social care, will have more to say about that when he replies to the debate.
	For my part, I want to focus on the Government's approach to volunteering, which is based on three principles. The first is that volunteering, including mentoring, is the bedrock of our society. The second is that the Government have an enabling role to play, investing in organisations with the expertise to make the best use of resources and breaking down barriers to volunteering, and I will deal with some of the points that the hon. Gentleman raised on that. The third—this is important—is that volunteering should be seen as complementary to state action, not a substitutefor it.
	I will deal first with the role that volunteering and mentoring play in our society. Almost 50 years ago, William Beveridge published a report—not his most famous—entitled "Voluntary Action" on the role of the voluntary sector in society. One phrase in it seems particularly apt as we meet in this House today. Voluntary action, he wrote, expressed
	"the driving power of social conscience".
	I spent the first day of volunteers week last Thursday visiting and volunteering at different organisations, and for me they showed that driving power in action. They included the Whitechapel mission, serving breakfast to the homeless; Live magazine in Brixton, which is produced for and by some of the most disadvantaged young people in south London; the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers, with its 140,000 volunteers across the UK, which is improving public spaces all round Britain; and Sixty Plus, in Kensington and Chelsea, which brings together young people and older citizens.
	The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-East (Mr. McFadden), volunteered for the excellent senior citizens' link line project in Bilston in his constituency, to which I pay tribute today, and the Minister for the Cabinet Office, my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Durham (Hilary Armstrong), visited a women's aid project and volunteered there this morning.
	What united the volunteers in those diverse organisations was both the individual fulfilment that people got out of their volunteering and the difference that they were making to their communities, as those to whom I spoke confirmed. As the hon. Gentlemanand others have said, we see that all around the country, from the millions of volunteer sports coaches, to the hundreds of thousands of school governors, to the many thousands of volunteers who campaign for the causes in which they believe.
	The Government, of course, do not create volunteers, and it is important to remember that, but they do have an enabling role, which takes me to the second principle of our approach. That is partly seen in the enabling role of the Government investing in our volunteering infrastructure, and I want to talk about our future plans in that regard.
	Today, 47 per cent. of young people volunteer at least once a year. In the ways that they contribute—my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Patrick Hall) made this point—they are a living contradiction to the stereotype of yobbishness with which too many young people are branded today. It is the responsibility of the media—which we often like to criticise—but also of politicians, to represent a balanced picture of young people. We want many more young people to have the chance to volunteer—1 million more young people over five years. We know that volunteering enables young people to develop new skills outside school and broaden their horizons. By working with the third sector, public services and the private sector, our aim is to transform the number of young people who get involved in volunteering in their communities.

Edward Miliband: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who gives me the chance to say that a committee under Sir Les Elton is considering the whole issue of the implementation of the Licensing Act, particularly as it affects village halls and other venues.
	There are different rules and procedures for those that serve alcohol as against those that do not, and it is very important that they are implemented properly. I take the hon. Gentleman's point and would be happy to talk further with him.
	As I said, we are working with VITA, but it is also important to give volunteering opportunities to those who are excluded and under-represented in terms of those opportunities, including disabled people, black and ethnic minorities and other socially excluded groups. I can announce today that we are allocating£3 million for a new partnership between the Media Trust and organisations representing disabled, black and ethnic minority and socially excluded groups to try to open up volunteering opportunities for them.
	The Government's role is not only about improving the volunteering infrastructure, but about removing barriers to volunteering. The new Office of the Third Sector, based in the Cabinet Office, offers an opportunity for greater co-ordination within Government of the effort to break down those barriers, three of which have been cited in particular as preventing volunteering. First, there is the deterrent effect of potential legal action for incidents involving volunteers. Several hon. Members raised that issue. Tomorrow, the Compensation Bill receives its Second Reading in the House. It represents an important response to concerns that have been raised, including in the private Member's Bill introduced in 2004 by the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier). Part 1 of the Compensation Bill makes it clear that when considering a claim of negligence, courts will be able to consider the wider social value of the activity. That will help to ensure that voluntary organisations are not discouraged from taking on volunteers by the threat of legal action. It has been widely welcomed by many organisations that use volunteers. For example, the Scout Association has said that it welcomes the proposals.
	Secondly, there is the operation of the Criminal Records Bureau, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire and by the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart), who is no longer in his place. Every year, about 500,000 checks on volunteers are processed by the CRB free of charge as a result of a decision made by this Government. That is a considerably higher number of applications than was expected. There have been concerns about delays in processing, but I am pleased to say that the situation has improved, with 93 per cent. of standard checks completed within two weeks and 88 per cent. of enhanced checks completed within four weeks. Of course, we recognise that there is scope for further improvement in this area, and we will continue to consult the sector and work with the CRB to bring about improvements. We are working on several matters, but I believe that the situation has improved.
	Thirdly, concerns have been raised, including in the Russell report, about the benefit rules being a possible deterrent to volunteering. On examination, it turned out that many of those anxieties related to the implementation of the rules rather than the rules themselves. For example, those on jobseeker's allowance can volunteer provided that they continue to look for work and can start a job within a week. That is why the Government have launched an updated guide to volunteering while on benefits. The task is now to ensure that it is implemented locally in jobcentres.
	A final part of the enabling role of Government is to build an ethos of volunteering—the sense that we all have a responsibility to put something back into our society. That must start in schools, and that is why the Government have already piloted the active citizens in schools programme and are determined to do more to embed volunteering in the citizenship curriculum. We are also working with the private sector, through Business in the Community, and with the public sector to open up more volunteering opportunities and persuade more people to volunteer.
	The third principle of the Government's approach is that the role of the third sector in general, and volunteers in particular, must be seen as a supplement to and not a substitute for Government funding of public services. The relationship of state and the third sector has always been difficult for our society—we should be honest about that—and, indeed, for any major advanced industrial society that has a welfare state. The third sector can reach out to the disadvantaged, it is close to the communities that it serves and it has a deserved reputation for innovation. As we have already heard in the debate, the role of volunteers reflects the reality that there will always be ways in which Government provision and services can be supplemented by the engagement of volunteers. However, volunteering must not be seen as, and cannot be a cut-price alternative to Government. That is true of the third sector generally.
	Before the second world war, the patchwork nature of the welfare state may have encouraged a spirit of charity and voluntary action, but Labour Members do not romanticise that era, for it was a time when services were frail and failed many people. For Labour Members, the significant increases in expenditure on public services—and the resultant improvements—are consistent with the increase in volunteering. Both contribute to a more just society.
	Today's debate is important because I hope that it might enable us to declare a happy consensus on the need for partnership between the state and the voluntary sector. That would be welcome. It would mark a major change from the position of the Conservative party in the 1980s, when the choice between state and volunteer was perceived as a zero sum game—more state provision meant crowding out the volunteer; less state provision was desirable because it would increase voluntary action.

Adam Afriyie: Does the Parliamentary Secretary share my concern that today, many volunteers give much of their time to hospitals throughout the country serving tea, providing artwork and performing many other noble tasks? I was stunned by his party political point because my example shows the substitution of volunteer labour for public expenditure. Will he do something about that?

Iain Duncan Smith: The speech to which the Parliamentary Secretary refers dealt with the relationship between larger charities and the smaller voluntary groups. He should go back to his office and examine carefully what happens with some of the bigger charities. Approximately 5 per cent. dominate charitable giving to such an extent that many smaller groups cannot get money. At the same time, they dominate the relationship with big government, often dictatingthe pressure on it. Genuine voluntary effort in the community groups often gets crowded out by that combination of big government and big charity.

David Heath: I very much welcome the debate and the tone in which the hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) opened it. I suspected from the start that this would be one of the most consensual debates of the year, and, so far, that has been borne out by the words of the hon. Gentleman and of the Minister. I think that this is the first time that I have had the opportunity to welcome the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Doncaster, North (Edward Miliband) to his new responsibilities, after he was so cruelly robbed of that opportunity during the course of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. I congratulate him, and warmly welcome him. I also thank him for what he has said today. If he makes a habit of quoting that great Liberal, William Beveridge, in his speeches, he will maintain a welcome from these Benches.
	We need to recognise that, although the contributions to the debate will probably follow more or less the same lines—albeit with some areas of tension, such as the one that was explored in the latter stages of the Minister's speech—the warm feeling that comes from congratulating the voluntary sector from the Chamber is insufficient to its needs. To use the time-honoured phrase, fine words butter no parsnips. The requirement is not only to feel well disposed towards the voluntary sector, but to help it to do its essential job and to recognise some of the barriers that stand in its way.
	We have already heard about the huge range of activities across the country that are covered by the voluntary sector. Those activities are all done for the greater public good. The citizens advice bureaux, for instance, do a marvellous job in many of our communities. Those who work with elderly people are doing work that would otherwise not be done, because it would not be done by the statutory sector. There are also the special constables, who were mentioned by the hon. Member for Stockton, South (Ms Taylor).
	Those who work in the artistic and cultural heritage sectors are important to the life of our communities, not only adding to but maintaining that which we have. The industrial heritage sector in particular is often unsung. In that sector, people devote their lives to maintaining things that give instruction and pleasure to people in our local communities.
	We should not forget those in local government, who are often forgotten in their role as volunteers. In fact, local government is made up of volunteers, particularly at parish council level. Many parish councillors take on considerable responsibilities in return for few thanks and little reward, and I am grateful for the work that they do. Those who volunteer to work for political parties certainly do not often receive thanks publicly, but they are volunteers none the less. Many of them give their time because of their commitment to a principle. They are prepared to do that day after day, week after week and year after year, and we should say thank you to them. We may feel that a number of them are mistaken in their political beliefs, but they are all doing what they do because they believe it to be for the common good.
	School governors, who have been mentioned today, take on an extraordinarily responsible task nowadays, which is probably far beyond what they thought they were taking on in the first instance. I am worried by some of the responsibilities that now fall on their shoulders.
	We should also take account of youth work, in its widest context. I am glad that the hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire mentioned his sea cadets, because I think we should pay special regard to the inestimable value of the work of the cadet force with young people. It does not merely provide them with the experiences that it is traditionally so good at providing. Earlier today, my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Danny Alexander) told me that at the weekend he had presented awards for community service to a number of cadets who had been not climbing mountains, sailing ships or flying planes, but helping the elderly as part of their training. That strikes me as an extremely valuable contribution.
	There are those who raise funds for all sorts of purposes: organisations such as rotary clubs and, in my part of the world, carnival associations. Carnivals are not, in fact, a Notting Hill phenomenon; they are a Somerset phenomenon. We have the largest and best carnivals in the country, although they are not known to a great many people. The work of carnival associations continues throughout the year. They produce the floats for carnivals such as the Bridgwater carnival, which is attended by a quarter of a million people. Such carnivals raise a phenomenal amount of money for good causes.
	We would not have a sports structure withoutthe voluntary sector—without the coaches, the groundsmen and the honorary secretaries, treasurers, presidents and chairmen of the sports clubs in our constituencies. Those who work for the environment and conservation give up their time to make their communities that little bit better. But it is pointless to highlight particular organisations or individuals, because the list is endless.
	The Minister may be relieved to hear that I am not going to invite him to my constituency—not because I would not be delighted to see him there, and not because I do not have a huge array of local organisations that I think would be worthy of his attention, but simply because I recognise that he has new responsibilities in his Department. Let me say how glad I am that responsibility for voluntary work has been removed from the maw of the Home Office and its tottering empire and given to the Cabinet Office, where I hope more attention will be paid to it.
	Last, but certainly not least, are carers. No doubt attention will be paid to them later. They are, by definition, volunteers. They probably do not think of themselves as such but rather as people who provide care either because of an obligation or out of love for the individual on whom they are bestowing that care. However, they are part of the voluntary sector. What does the sector provide? It adds value to statutory activities and fills the gaps that the statutory providers will never fill. It also strengthens communities, supports families and reduces crime.
	I want to highlight the effect of the sector on rural areas. We often think of urban volunteers as providing services, but that activity is often even more important in rural areas because of the lack of statutory provision. If the statutory bodies and local authorities do not provide various functions, it is left to the volunteers to fill those gaps. I applaud the point made about the Licensing Act 2003 and its effect on village hall committees. Village halls are often key components of voluntary activity in local areas.
	Volunteering is done for a mixture of motives. Altruism is one. Care and love for individuals is another. The feeling that one has skills that are unused and can be put to better use for the community is a third. The fourth, and not to be forgotten, motive is fun. It is fun to do a lot of the activities, and people engage in voluntary activities for that purpose.

David Heath: I thought that the hon. Gentleman was suggesting that I held that view. I emphatically do not. However, I now understand that he was referring to the Minister. That debate can be resolved during the course of the evening.
	The hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire is equally right to point out the barriers. We should be concentrating on those. It is not enough simply to applaud what is done, but to say how we can enable that to happen in a better and more effective way. There are some aspects of voluntary work in which people are prevented from doing their best, sometimes by a lack of facilities, such as sports fields, and the lack of investment in local communities that provides the wherewithal for people to offer their services effectively. Sometimes it happens because of bureaucracy. The Criminal Records Bureau is still a live issue for many people. I welcome what the Minister said about improvement, but I recognise, because I have come across it in my constituency—all hon. Members must find the same thing—that the inevitable checks have a depressing effect on the preparedness of people to volunteer.
	The checks and balances that we put in place must be proportionate. Of course we must protect the young and the vulnerable, but we need to do so in a way that is consonant with people still providing the levels of support that they themselves can offer. That also applies to the area of risk aversion, which has been mentioned. The Compensation Bill goes some way toward dealing with that.
	However, the problem is often not the so-called compensation culture—I have never been convinced that such a culture exists—or litigation being carried through into court; rather, it is the interpretation by organisations of their liability through litigation that prevents them from doing things that they would otherwise do. A huge educative process is needed in order to tell organisations, "Yes, you can expose people to appropriate risk in carrying out outdoor activities in particular. That is not a wrong thing to do—it strengthens people and their prospects for the future—provided that you take reasonable precautions and measures to ensure that they do not come to harm."
	It worries me that support for the voluntary sector, particularly from local government, is always vulnerable. By definition, it occurs in marginal areas of statutory duties, which means that when times are hard in local government, such support is cut. That principle even extends to social services and support for carers in many parts of the country, which is in any case a patchwork of provision and is now under real threat.
	The key issue, however, is the financial consequences, and here I shall concentrate on carers. For many, the restrictions on the carer's allowance are a real difficulty. An example is the 35-hour restriction, which rules out many people. Moreover, when people become statutory pensioners, they lose the carer's allowance. I understand the financial consequences of taking a different view on this issue; nevertheless, that restriction represents a horror story for many elderly carers, particularly those who are caring for their even more elderly parents. People can earn up to a limit of £84 a week, which is not very much, before they start to lose their carer's allowance. Those who are at school, university or college for more than 21 hours a week do not qualify for carer's allowance. These are all restrictions on people who are desperate to support their loved ones in their homes, and who, in doing so, are saving the state vast sums of money. In addition, such caring is to the advantage of the individual being cared for.
	The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (David Lepper) was right to draw attention to child carers, who are the forgotten carers. I hope that schools and colleges become much more aware of this issue, spot the stress experienced by young people who are caring for a parent or an older sibling in the home, and make arrangements to support them through their schooling, so that their education does not suffer, and to support them socially by acting as mentors and helping them deal with the problems that inevitably lie in their way.
	We have a pension reform programme, which recognises the difficulties faced by carers, but does not propose to do anything about them during the lifetime of those who are currently carers. That is an issue of huge concern.

Lynda Waltho: I support the main thrust of the motion, especially where it talks of the care and dedication of carers, but we need to be clear about the definition of carers. They can be relatives, friends or neighbours who look after someone who cannot manage without help because of sickness, age or disability. Carers look after people of all ages and can be of all ages themselves. They can be male or female, although they are more often women. Parents who care for a child with a long-term illness or disability are also carers. Some carers look after someone for a few hours a week; others do so for24 hours a day, every day. Many carers care in their own homes, while others support friends living nearby or miles away.
	My constituency is located in the Dudley area, where there are 35,000 carers, of whom 7,500 provide more than 50 hours a week. In addition, there are 900 young carers between the ages of five and 17. That caring support is given willingly, but it must never be taken for granted.
	It has been said that carers need society's support as well as its thanks, and that support has led to a great deal being achieved by the combined efforts of organisations campaigning on carers' behalf. Those achievements should also be considered alongside the raft of progressive policy initiatives introduced by this Labour Government.
	This Government are the first to recognise the needs of carers as well as the needs of those who are cared for, and I have seen the effects of their progressive policies on the lives of carers in Dudley. Those carers are also assisted by a dedicated and well organised network that is most ably co-ordinated by a great lady named Christine Rowley.
	In addition, we in Dudley are fortunate to have a dedicated helpline that gives carers the opportunity to talk to other carers. That excellent service is staffed by volunteer carers, whose experience ensures that they understand what callers are going through. The aim is to provide a listening ear, carer to carer, and the service is invaluable to many people in my constituency.
	As well as the advice line, carers have access to a vast amount of information on financial matters, health, respite care and employment issues. That access to information is vital, and it is a matter that comes up again and again when I talk to carers in my constituency. They want to be recognised for the care that they provide: they make a strong plea that they should not be called informal carers but that they should be considered to be the real professionals.
	I want to highlight the vital area of training opportunities for carers. In Dudley, we have established the care link scheme, which is aimed at people who want to find work in health and social care. Its dedicated team gives full support to job seekers, providing them with the skills needed for a satisfying role in the care industry. The scheme is also open to anyone between the ages of 24 and 59, and full support is given throughout.
	Carers can also work for the City and Guilds learning for living certificate, a personal development and learning qualification for unpaid carers. The expert patients programme helping people with long-term illnesses has been welcomed by local carers, and a new programme, "looking after me", has been developed specifically for carers who themselves have long-term illnesses. Tutors are just finishing their training, and the first course will be offered shortly.
	Dudley is well served by a service called Crossroads—named after the much loved soap opera based in a midlands motel—that provides caring for carers. The service was praised in 2005 by the Commission for Social Care Inspection for the work that it does in providing sitting services to help carers take a break. It is fully funded from Dudley council's carer's grant, and is backed by the Big Lottery Fund.
	All of the carers grant is still allocated to carers in Dudley. The money is directed specifically at carers who want to use it to enable them take a break. Flexibility is the key, and some 200 carers will benefit from the funding next year.
	I also want, however, to draw attention to the needs of parents of children with disabilities. Those of us who are parents of able-bodied children generally expect our responsibilities to decrease over time, but that is not so for the parents of children with disabilities. Their caring responsibilities generally increase as their children get older and less help is provided by the support services.
	In that connection, I want to pay particular tribute to the Orchard partnership, based in Stourbridge. That unique and vital service for vulnerable children with disabilities and their families was set up by a group of parents co-ordinated—and, as is often of the case, chivvied and coerced—by one parent in particular. That parent is Madeleine Cowley, who is now the chairman of the organisation—a volunteer, of course.
	Many children now survive illnesses that they would not have survived even 10 years ago, and the Orchard partnership was set up to address their needs and those of their carers. It helps them to have the same quality of life that other children enjoy. I have paid several visits to the Orchard: I have watched its Saturday club run drama workshops, met parent and carer support groups and seen children and carers benefit from short breaks. There is also a special youth forum that is focused on raising the profile of the issues facing young disabled people and their families during the vital period of transition to adult life. The parent-led committee continues to support the services offered by the Orchard partnership and all the services benefit from the contribution of volunteer support workers. All the volunteers are a valuable asset and really enhance the services provided to the children and their families. The Orchard provides a toy library and I was proud to become patron of that last year, at the launch of the story sacks. That is a great initiative that allows parents to use puppets when they are telling stories to their children. I do not quite know who enjoyed that more—me or the children—but it is certainly a brilliant initiative.
	On a more serious note, I draw the Minister's attention to the problem that such services face when funding streams approach their ends. Lengthy waits are often endured before hearing about confirmation of continued funding for future development. Perhaps he can offer some hope of stability or ring-fencing of funding for such projects in the future.
	To sum up my contribution to today's debate, I will paraphrase my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister: a lot done, a lot more to do. I am proud to have been part of a Government who recognise that caring can affect both the health and the financial status of carers and their families, that access to employment opportunities helps to maintain financial security and self-confidence, that training and education enables people to return to work when they want to or to work flexibly according to their needs, and that access to leisure services gives carers time to themselves to recharge their batteries. It is vital that that is where we target this support. Carers are entitled to the same benefits as anybody else. Put simply: they have earned them. Some ask, "Can we afford to support carers?" We should answer, "Can we afford not to?"

Richard Benyon: I have scythed through my speech and will get through it in seconds. I just want to touch on some of the points that have been raised and add a few of my own. In west Berkshire, I am lucky to have an excellent volunteer centre, which is run by its director Garry Poulson. He and I talk regularly about what encourages people to volunteer and what makes the voluntary sector tick. He keeps interesting statistics showing who walks through his door and the different areas of volunteering that he guides them towards. It is fascinating to see the number of young people who are volunteering, the gender difference and the type of activities that people wish to go towards.
	My hon. Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) touched on the important subject of what prevents people from volunteering. I will touch on that in the few minutes that I have left. As the vice-chairman of our local citizens advice bureau, I completely take the point made by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath). I have spent hours discussing governance issues such as the accounts, the reserves policy, and whether we should be incorporated. All those sort of things sap one's enthusiasm for volunteering. We are interested in what the organisation does and not necessarily how the mechanics of administrating it work. We have to look seriously at the pressure that we put on volunteers in terms of the administration of voluntary bodies—whether we are talking about the Criminal Records Bureau, the fear of litigation, the cost of insurance, compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, or all the financial regulations that are involved.
	There is a wonderful book by Robert Putnam called "Bowling Alone", which looks at the problems of American society—many of which are reflected in this country, as well. He identifies one of the key factors—it was touched on by my hon. Friend the Memberfor North-East Bedfordshire—that limits people's availability to volunteer: time. Professor Putnam has calculated that every 10 minutes of commuting cutsall forms of social engagement by 10 per cent. That is 10 per cent. fewer family suppers and 10 per cent. fewer local club meetings and other community activities. So, the knock-on effect of the successful battle that we fought in west Berkshire to protect our rail service was to increase to a small degree, or at least sustain, the amount of volunteering. Professor Putnam makes the poignant point that people who want to volunteer get home from work exhausted and it is easier to sit down and watch "Friends" than go out to find and interact with real ones.
	Can Government make more people volunteer? Of course, in a direct sense, the answer is almost universally no. However, they can incentivise and make it easier for people to volunteer. I want to point to one key example in my constituency: Vodafone. Vodafone has not had a very good press in recent days, but it continues to be a force for good in west Berkshire. There is scarcely a voluntary body that it does not help financially and, matching that, it encourages employees to participate in environmental working parties and community reading projects. It creates a virtuous circle of a diminution in sickness and increase in productivity. I thus urge the Government to examine the incentives that they can give to companies.
	In conclusion, I ask the Government to accept that it is crucial to understand the difference between the voluntary sector and the not-for-profit charitable sector. The latter is an arm's length deliverer of Government services, with a huge call on financial resources, while the other is a wonderfully anarchic network of social and emotional interaction. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) said, the voluntary sector should be allowed to exercise its will—sometimes in the wrong direction, but always with enormous enthusiasm and in the directionof ultimate right—within the framework of the Government's plans for the sector.

Ivan Lewis: Everyone would agree we have had an excellent debate in which right hon. and hon. Members have rightly paid tribute to the many unsung heroes who make us proud of our constituencies and of our country.
	In a world of perpetual change, the selfless dedication of volunteers and carers is a beacon of light that keeps alive the timeless values of compassion, solidarity and service. Those individuals shatter the cynicism of people who portray today's society as one in which violence, antisocial behaviour and abuse are rife. Carers enable older and disabled people, as well as people with long-term chronic conditions, to remain at home with the dignity, autonomy and security that the rest of us take for granted. Whether it is the adult daughter or son caring 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year for an ageing parent, or the friend who makes daily visits to an adult with a learning disability, carers are in the front line in ensuring that all our citizens have the quality of life that we demand in a civilised and fair society.
	It is right to recognise that carers have their own practical and emotional needs, distinct from those of the people for whom they care, although that recognition is long overdue. We must strive to ensure that statutory and voluntary sector providers treat carers as equal and valued partners in the care and support offered to vulnerable people in all our communities. Volunteers are the living, breathing embodiment of a healthy civic society. Whether working under the auspices of a voluntary organisation, or simply making their own personal contribution, they are frequently at the heart of their communities. This month in my constituency, the Radcliffe carnival took place only because of the voluntary commitment of Ray and Hilda Veivers and Colin Jones. Next week's Prestwich carnival has been made possible by David Curtis and his Sunshine Team of volunteers. Every day in every community, volunteers make a difference to the lives of vulnerable people. The much maligned younger generation is often at the forefront of that service. Through Millennium Volunteers, faith groups, schools and universities, young people demonstrate their idealism, responsibility and commitment to helping others, shattering the illusion that the vast majority of young people are engaged in antisocial behaviour—a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Patrick Hall) and the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster, North (Edward Miliband).
	The Government believe that the state alone cannot transform communities. We are committed to an enhanced role for third sector organisations in the development and delivery of high quality public sector services. The restoration of community solidarity and civic pride requires new, authentic partnerships between the state, third sector organisations, the private sector and active citizens. Professionals, volunteers and carers all have a distinct but crucial role to play in ensuring not only that we care for vulnerable people, but that they have a quality of life fitting in a civilised modern society.
	I come to some of the excellent contributions made by right hon. and hon. Members. The hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), as usual, presented his argument in a reasonable and fair way, reflecting great credit on his contribution over many years, first in Bury, before he went, not entirely voluntarily, to North-East Bedfordshire. He rightly highlighted the contribution of sports volunteers. We ought to reflect on the massive contribution that volunteers made to the success of the Commonwealth games, which my home city, Manchester, was so proud to host. As we think about the World cup and our hosting of the Olympics, the careers of many of the successful footballers and athletes will start on Saturday and Sunday mornings, when volunteers enable young people to participate in sport. For many of our sporting heroes, that is how it all began.
	The hon. Gentleman mentioned his pride in being Minister for Disabled People for some time. He did not refer to his time as Minister with responsibility for the Child Support Agency, which I know was a stretching and challenging period for him. He rightly drew attention to the success of the Eden project, which is an excellent example of best practice in terms of involving young people.
	In debates such as this, I always say that at the age of 14 I became involved in voluntary work with people with learning disabilities. By the time I reached the age of 16 or 17, I had decided that I wanted to work professionally in the voluntary sector in social care. I do not believe that I would ever have gone into politics or that I would be standing at the Dispatch Box making this speech if I had not been connected at the age of 14 with that voluntary work with those people with learning disabilities, which made me think very differently about the kind of society I wanted to live in and the kind of contribution I wanted to make. That applies to large numbers of young people, who become involved on a voluntary basis and then decide that they want to make a contribution through public service. It is not just a matter of what people give, but of what they get through their own personal development and sense of satisfaction.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion (David Lepper) and the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) rightly spoke about young carers and our responsibility to identify their distinct needs, understand the pressures that they face daily, and recognise that in the education system and the health service we need to be better at identifying those young carers and providing the necessary support.
	The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome(Mr. Heath) spoke about the definition of carers under the Department of Trade and Industry flexible working legislation. The Department is consulting on that legislation and will take account of views about such a definition before reaching a final decision. My hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Dr. Francis) has made a massive personal contribution in advancing the cause of carers during his period as a Member of the House. That was based on his own experiences. The Carers (Equal Opportunities) Act 2004 will make a tremendous difference to carers' lives.
	The right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) made some valid points about the difference between small and large charities, but I do not believe there is any need to attack larger charities. We must build the capacity of smaller charities in local communities. I remember that when I worked in the voluntary sector we had a slogan: "Voluntary does not have to mean amateur". Vulnerable people depend on the activities of charities, so it is important that we do not think that voluntary organisations should not be accountable.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Lynda Waltho) spoke about the contribution of the Orchard partnership in her constituency, which sounds extremely innovative in its work. The hon. Member for Newbury (Mr. Benyon) raised a number of issues relating to work-life balance and family-friendly policies. I am sure he welcomes the Government's contribution in that respect.
	As we look ahead to the future, carers and volunteers know that the stakes are high. The Labour party in government is strengthening Britain with social justice as our eternal mission and as an integral part of our national success, whereas the Conservative party views the word "compassionate" purely as a political strategy to win power, not as the expression of common values. It is right that today, from all parts of the House, we pay tribute to the contribution of carers and volunteers.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That this House takes note of the immense contribution to society made by those honoured during the recent Volunteers Week and forthcoming Carers Week; recognises and values the significant economic and social benefits resulting from the work of volunteers and carers, often performed in difficult circumstances requiring the most selfless qualities; further notes the need to ensure that the fewest possible barriers are placed before those wanting to volunteer and act as carers; believes that encouragement should be given to all, especially the young, to consider volunteering as a contribution to the welfare of a healthy society; and expresses its thanks to all those who act as role models for volunteering and caring.

Willie Rennie: I would first like to thank Mr. Speaker for selecting asthma services as the subject for this Adjournment debate. It is a subject close to my heart and I gather, although not from the number of Members present, that it is also a subject in which hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country are interested.
	I should like to introduce the background to the debate. World asthma day was on 2 May, and like many other hon. Members I attended a reception given by Asthma UK in this House. The Secretary of State for Health also attended the event and made encouraging noises about the need to improve health care provision for people with long-term conditions.
	I am grateful to the Minister of State, Department of Health, the hon. Member for Doncaster, Central(Ms Winterton), for coming here today to expand on the Secretary of State's comments, and I will be sure to leave her ample time to deal with the detail of the Government's thinking.
	My hope and intention is that today's debate can be a constructive one in which as many Members as possible are able to feed to the Minister some of their thoughts and concerns about asthma services in the UK. There is much to be commended in the work that the Government have done for people with asthma. If that is not clear later on in my speech, it is only because time is tight and I am keen to flag up gaps in provision and procedures that could be improved. In particular I wish to pass on what people with asthma have said to me, because there is no doubt that they are among the best judges of what does and does not work, and what could be improved. Much of the Government's work for people with asthma is worthy of commendation. If that is not apparent later in my speech, it is only because time is tight. I am keen to flag up gaps in provision and procedures that could be improved. In particular, I want to pass on what people with asthma have said to me, because there is no doubt that they are among the best judges of what works, what does not work and what can be improved.
	I have lived with asthma all my life. My sister, Caroline, had undiagnosed asthma for many years, and her quality of life suffered as a consequence—at one point, she ended up in hospital with pneumonia. Through my sister's experience, my shovel-like cough was identified as a symptom of asthma, which was diagnosed at the age of two. My elder son, Alexander, has had two extended visits to hospital in years two and three of his life. My other son, Stephen, who is just two, is showing all the signs of asthma, but he is yet to be diagnosed.
	In my previous life, I worked with Asthma UK—at the time, it was known as the National Asthma Campaign—on a number of campaigns, including a campaign on smoking in public places. I am delighted to see that a similar ban to that in Scotland will be introduced in the rest of the country, which will makea big improvement to the quality of life of peoplewith asthma. Other important issues include the administration of medicines in schools and the redesign of asthma services.
	I have found ways to manage my asthma and, like many others with the condition, enjoy a number of sports and activities in which I would be unable to participate without proper medication. At this point, I challenge other hon. Members to join me in the Scottish coal-carrying championship, which takes place at the end of June. Competitors are required to carry a 1 cwt bag of coal for 1,000 m along the undulating main street in Kelty, my home village. Given the marathon sittings that hon. Members endure in this House, I imagine that they would find that a stroll in the park.
	I consider myself lucky that my asthma is relatively mild and controllable and that I have the wherewithal to pay for repeat prescriptions. I believe that the person should control the asthma rather than the asthma controlling the person. When GPs, nurses and pharmacists ask people with asthma whether their condition is under control, the people often say, "Yes.", but if they are asked whether they can climb stairs without wheezing, whether they can sleep for a whole night without wheezing and whether they can run for the bus, they often say, "No." People accept far too much of their condition, and awareness needs to be raised among people with asthma about the quality of life that they could live.
	I have personal experience of the benefits of modern medicines and the value of asthma clinics. When I was in my 20s, I did not control my asthma well, and when I went to the asthma clinic, the nurse told me that I would die if I continued not to control it. That information was dramatic, and it shook me up. The nurse explained that if I did not manage my asthma, the blue inhaler would not work and my lungs would collapse during my next asthma attack. I took that information to heart and have controlled my asthma much better—the modern medicines are fantastic. Nurses and pharmacists play as an important part as GPs, and they are skilled health professionals who should be encouraged to do even more. They are in the front line and face people with asthma all the time, and we should encourage them to do more to provoke people to reassess whether their condition is acceptable.
	Asthma is a disease of the lungs in which the airways are unusually sensitive to a wide range of triggers, including house dust mites, cold air, viral infections—in my case, it is usually colds—or cut grass. Common triggers also include tobacco smoke and animal fur—interestingly, people who live with a cat or dog in their early years tend not to suffer from animal sensitisation in later years, so not all animals are bad for people with asthma. The airways react to those triggers and become inflamed, resulting in symptoms of tightness and wheeziness in the chest. People suffering severe attacks find it nearly impossible to breathe and require rapid medication. Approximately 1,400 people die every year from asthma, and 90 per cent. of those deaths are preventable, which is a huge percentage that needs to be tackled.
	There are about 5.2 million people with asthma in the UK, which is one of the highest rates in the world. It affects one in eight children and one in 13 adults. An estimated 8 million people in the UK have been diagnosed with asthma at some stage in their lives—an average of one in seven of the population. There are now three to four times more adult people with asthma in the UK and six times more children with the condition than 25 years ago. There is a big debate as to why that is the case. Asthma is a serious problem encountered by a large proportion of the population. There is currently no cure for it. Some people say that the problem largely disappears when they enter adulthood; many, however, live with it for life. It is a condition that they manage through their medication and lifestyle adaptations.
	At the end of January this year, the Government published their White Paper on health care outside hospitals, entitled, "Our health, our care, our say", which came out of the consultation exercise, "Your health, your care, your say". There is much to applaud in that White Paper and much for which people with asthma have been calling for many years. In particular, I welcome the recognition that better community-based care can reduce hospital admissions and thus costs. I will, however, press the Minister to take that logic further in relation to prescription charges.
	Several specific proposals will have come as welcome news for people with asthma. First, there are the plans to develop so-called information prescriptions and personal care plans for those with long-term conditions. They constitute an important recognition that people can be the best judges of their own needs. I hope that the Minister can confirm that information prescriptions will be just one part of a larger drive towards self-management of long-term medical conditions. I am sure that she will know that my colleagues have long espoused the value of self-management for the estimated 17.5 million people in Britain living with chronic conditions.
	The potential benefits of such an approach are considerable. For example, a person aware of the nature of their condition and empowered to control it should be less likely to require regular emergency treatment, thereby reducing the burden on stretched NHS resources. Asthma UK estimates that for every £1.60 spent on personal asthma action plans, £7 is saved on NHS care. Many people with asthma resent the feeling of powerlessness that comes with the uncertainty about when attacks might occur. A successful self-management programme should improve a person's mental health and self-esteem as well as promoting their long-term physical well-being. Self-management programmes could be integrated with greater use of voluntary sector organisations such as Asthma UK. There is no doubt that people with asthma looking to develop self-management programmes would benefit from the expert advice that voluntary sector organisations can offer and from the chance to talk to other people with asthma within that context.
	Will the Minister expand on how the Government see self-management programmes developing? In particular, may I encourage her to make a commitment to place a clear duty on local health commissioners to commission self-management packages for people with asthma involving patient groups in the design, delivery and evaluation? I hope that she will consult her colleagues in the Scottish Executive, who are funding a pilot project for personal health plans using asthma as the test condition. I am sure that lessons can be learned from each other's experience. The White Paper recognises that health professionals have not always been given sufficient incentives to manage long-term conditions. I have heard many GPs and consultants say that asthma is sorted, but when one hears people with asthma tell stories about what they have to put up with, it is clear that that is certainly not so.
	As I said, about 1,400 people die from asthma each year and about 90 per cent. of those deaths are preventable. It is worth taking a minute to consider how those deaths could have been avoided.
	First, it is important that people who are admitted to hospital with severe asthma attacks are seen by respiratory specialists. One in five people with asthma say that they do not get to see an asthma specialist when their asthma becomes hard to control. There must be adequate provision of asthma specialists across the board, from GPs and nurses with specific asthma training to respiratory specialists for emergency admissions and long-term support.
	Secondly, the Government must be willing to fund properly research into the causes, treatment, cure and prevention of asthma. Asthma UK already puts more funding into asthma research than the Government. A recent report by the UK clinical research collaborative found that respiratory diseases received disproportionately low funding, considering the number of people affected. Indeed, respiratory disease is now the most common illness responsible for emergency admissions to hospitals and kills more people than coronary heart disease.
	Above all, the Government must be committed to keeping people with asthma out of hospital by improving their day-to-day support. Nearly 200 people are admitted to hospital every day with emergency asthma attacks at a cost of nearly £80 million. As many as 75 per cent. of hospital admissions are probably preventable with proper long-term care and support.
	On 20 March, the Secretary of State called for a30 per cent. reduction in hospital admissions. She estimated that that would save the NHS more than £400 million a year. The Government's health White Paper commits them to refocusing the quality and outcomes framework of the GP contract and changing the payment by result system to encourage greater concentration on managing long-term conditions. I welcome that and I hope that the Minister can expand on what it might mean for people with asthma who too often feel deprived of specialist advice on the day-to-day management of their condition.
	The role of the voluntary sector is vital. I hope hon. Members will not object if I focus on the services provided by Asthma UK as it is the example with which I am most familiar. That is not intended as a slight on the many other charities and support groups that provide excellent services for people with asthma, but I wish to highlight the role of Asthma UK because it has been developing the concept of self-management for some time. The Government could learn much from its example and establish a useful partnership with Asthma UK on the issue.
	Asthma UK provides an advice line, which is staffed by specialist nurses, who can offer advice on medication and effective self-management. It has also helped thousands of people develop personal asthma action plans or care plans, which already deliver genuine benefits in reducing symptoms and improving quality of life. However, research by Asthma UK suggests that only 24 per cent. of people with asthma have care plans. I know that the Minister will want to explain how the Government intend to extend such plans so that people with asthma have access to them.
	The Minister may be interested to hear about Asthma UK's control test—a 60-second, five-point questionnaire that helps people to understand how their asthma is controlled, with a simple score out of 25. I tried it today and I am pleased to say that I scored 23 out of 25, which is not too bad. I encourage hon. Members to take part in the census because it is a good way in which to assess how well one's asthma is being controlled.
	I hope that the Minister will join me in applauding a joint collaboration between Asthma UK, the British Heart Foundation and Diabetes UK, which have worked with primary care trusts, the Department of Health, the Healthcare Commission and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence to develop a so-called "commissioners' toolkit". It is intended to outline examples of good practice in the treatment of long-term conditions such as asthma, heart conditions and diabetes and is to be made available to all commissioners of health care.
	The final issue that I would like to raise is, I believe, one of the most important, which ties in closely with the theme that I have sought to develop, namely reducing hospital admissions through encouraging self-management of asthma. It is prescription charges. The current system of exemptions from prescription charges dates from 1968 and makes little sense now, if it ever did. The Minister will remember the 2002 report by Mr. Wanless, entitled, "Securing our Future Health: Taking a Long-Term View". In it, Mr. Wanless stated:
	"The present structure of exemptions from prescription charges is not logical, nor rooted in the principles of the NHS. If related issues are being considered in future, it is recommended that the opportunity should be taken to think about the rationale for the exemption policy."
	Members will be familiar with the general arguments for extending exemptions to a greater range of long-term conditions, but I hope that they will forgive me if I reiterate some of the key points. The present system fails the test of fairness. People with diabetes and certain forms of epilepsy are exempt from prescription charges, but people with arthritis, asthma, mental illness and multiple sclerosis are not. Those with an underactive thyroid are exempt, but those with an overactive thyroid are not.
	The present system hits the poorest hardest. The Government's 2000 NHS plan states:
	"New charges increase the proportion of funding from the unhealthy, old and poor compared with the healthy, young and wealthy. In particular, high charges risk worsening access to healthcare by the poor."
	People with incomes barely above the income support level have to meet the full cost of prescriptions, providing them with two disincentives: a disincentive to work and a disincentive to pay for necessary prescriptions. The knock-on effects of this problem are precisely those that we all wish to avoid. Prescription charges discourage people with asthma from taking medication to control their condition, and encourage them to think of treatment as something only to be taken in an emergency. This increases emergency hospital admissions, thus increasing costs to the NHS. It may also lead to a number of preventable deaths every year.
	I am pleased to report that the Scottish Executive are undertaking a review of prescription charges. They have recognised the innate unfairness in the system, and the extensive review will include a full literature review, consultation and debate. I hope that the Government will read the review documentation and have discussions with the Scottish Executive about their emerging conclusions.
	I do not expect the Minister to make new policy in this Chamber at this time. I would, however, welcome her personal view on how the system of exemptions for prescription charges might develop in the future. As she knows, my party committed itself at the last election to an independent review to suggest reforms to the system of exemptions. I would be grateful if she could tell me whether she sees merit in this suggestion. I would also be grateful to hear the views of others on this matter. It is my view that free prescriptions for people with asthma would do much to help them to control their condition and live normal lives, and I would welcome a range of views on the issue.
	I would now like to give the Minister a chance to give a full response, and I hope that she will make specific reference to the important issues that I have raised about people with asthma.